Internet literacy: Young people’s negotiation of new online opportunities

Abstract

Este artigo concentrou-se nas continuidades históricas entre a literacidade na internet e a literacidade no impresso, de forma que as expectativas ambiciosas que a sociedade guarda para a literacidade no impresso (notadamente, a importância de escrever tão bem quanto ler e a expectativa de um entendimento crítico) podem ser estendidos para a literacidade na internet na era da informação, porque isso não apenas dá suporte para uma forma de trabalho qualificada, mas também assegura expressão cultural, participação cívica e deliberação democrática. Questionamos o senso comum em relação à habilidade dos mais jovens com a internet, não apenas para desafiá-los, mas para fazer ver a deficiência social em dar o suporte suficiente para sua literacidade.

Full text

Citation: Livingstone, Sonia. “Internet Literacy: Young People’s Negotiation of New Online Opportunities." Digital Youth, Innovation, and
the Unexpected.Edited by Tara McPherson. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 101–122. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262633598.101
Copyright: c
2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works Unported 3.0 license.
Internet Literacy: Young People’s Negotiation of New Online
Opportunities
Sonia Livingstone
London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Media and Communications
The “Internet Generation”?
It’s just like life, youcan do anythingreally. ...Myyoungercousins,...they’renowcominginto anage
where the Internet is all they’ve ever known. (Lorie, 17, from Essex)1
If the Internet is, as Lorie suggests, “just like life,” for better and for worse, then the mother
of ten-year-old Anna is surely observing a profound generational transformation when she
says:
I’ll have to come up to a level because otherwise I will, I’ll be a dinosaur, and the children, when children
laugh at you and sort of say “Blimey, mum, don’t you even know that?” ... Already now I might do
something and I say “Anna, Anna, what is it I’ve got to do here?” and she’ll go “Oh mum, you’ve just
got to click the—” and she’ll be whizzing, whizzing dreadfully.
For previously new media—books, comics, cinema, radio, and television—even if parents
weren’t familiar with the particular contents their children engaged with, at least they could
access and understand the medium so that, if they wished to understand what their children
were doing or share the activity with them, they could. With the advent of digital media,
things have changed. The demands of the computer interface are significant, rendering
many parents “dinosaurs” in the information age inhabited by their children. But, more
importantly, attention to these demands blinds us to the real challenge of using digital
media, namely the potential for engagement with information and education content, and
for participation in online activities, networks, and communities. Indeed, the very difficulty
of accessing and using the internet beguiles many adults into believing that if only they
could master “clicking” on links with the mouse, then they—like their children—would be
internet “experts.” This is not a belief that we hold for the pen, else we’d stop teaching pupils
English once they had learned to read and write, but the child who “whizzes” around the
screen seems so skilled that, we conclude comfortably, they know all they need to know
already.
Such a conclusion seems confirmed by the extraordinary news headlines of young hackers
breaking national security codes or teenage entrepreneurs making a fortune on E-Bay, not to
This chapter draws on research funded by an Economic and Social Research Council grant (RES-335-
25-0008) as part of the U.K.’s “e-Society” Programme, with co-funding from AOL-UK, BSC, Childnet-
International, Citizens Online, ITC, and Ofcom. Thanks to Magdalena Bober, Ellen Helsper, Rodney
Livingstone, Elizabeth van Couvering, and Nancy Thumim for their constructive contributions to the
work presented here.

102 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
mention the youthful origins of such recent successes as Google and YouTube. Young people
themselves, conscious of being the first generation to grow up with the internet, concur with
the public celebration of their status as “digital natives.”2Amir (15, from London) says
confidently, “I don’t find it hard to use a computer because I got into it quickly. You learn
quick because it’s a very fun thing to do.” Nina (17, from Manchester) adds scathingly, “My
Dad hasn’t even got a clue. Can’t even work the mouse. . . . So I have to go on the Internet for
him.” But while these claims contain a sizeable grain of truth, we must also recognize their
rhetorical value for the speakers. Only in rare instances in history have children gained greater
expertise than parents in skills highly valued by society (diasporic children’s learning of the
host language before their parents is a good example). More usually, youthful expertise—
in music, games, or imaginative play—is accorded little, serious value by adults, even if
envied nostalgically. Thus, although young people’s newfound online skills are justifiably
trumpeted by both generations, this does not put them beyond critical scrutiny, for the
young entrepreneurs and hackers are the exceptions rather than the norm.
This chapter will engage with several claims illustrated by Anna’s mother, above. First, I
propose that the widespread struggle among educators, parents, researchers and policy mak-
ers to conceptualize what it is (young) people “know” or need to know when using the inter-
net is usefully resolved by conceptualizing this knowledge in terms of literacy. This allows us
to draw on, and learn from, a long intellectual history of debate over the nature of literacy
(from print literacy to audiovisual and media literacies, information literacy, advertising liter-
acy, cyberliteracy, games literacy, critical literacy, and many more), notwithstanding critical
doubts over “literacy” as a normative or elitist project.3Through the concept of literacy, I
suggest, we can weave together an account of basic and advanced skills, linking individual
skills with social practices and crossing the boundary between formal and informal learning.
Second, I show that the internet poses specific and new demands on the understanding of its
users (and would-be users), which, as empirical work with children themselves reveals, not
all manage. Third, and contrary to Anna’s mother’s assumption, I argue that mastering the
technology means mastering not just the hardware, but all that the internet affords its users.
Thus we should be satisfied with nothing less than an ambitious definition of literacy given
the considerable social, economic, cultural, and political ambitions that society has for the
information society and, especially, for the so-called “internet generation.”
Introducing Three Children
To ground the present discussion, and without meaning either to celebrate or to criticize
them, I will briefly introduce three children who participated in the UK Children Go Online
project to convey the richness and subtlety of their knowledge of, and their continuing
struggles with, the internet.4For behind the excited rhetoric of young online experts, the
everyday reality is inevitably more complex, as ethnographic research on the domestication
of new technologies readily shows.5
Ifirst visited Megan when she was eight years old, in 1999. A bright girl from a working
class family, Megan lived in a media-rich but small house with her rather “stay-at-home”
parents and her older brother, a computer enthusiast. She loved writing stories and animals,
especially her pet hamster. She also loved playing on the computer, and her parents proudly
termed her “an information junkie,” having high educational aspirations for her. At the same
time, they kept an eye on her internet use from the living room, being cautious about her
online activities and encouraging visiting trusted sites rather than bold exploration, gently

Internet Literacy 103
restricting her to information rather than communication applications. When I sat with
Megan while she showed me her online activities, my observations suggested that her skills
were somewhat exaggerated by her parents, her internet use being narrowly concentrated on
three sites—AskJeeves for searching, Nickelodeon for games (linked to her favorite children’s
television series Rugrats), and a few sites about pets (e.g., Petstore.com). Her use of these sites
often proved frustrating and inefficient.
In 2003, I returned to the family, when Megan was 12. Though various aspects of family life
had now changed—her father had a new job, her mother had returned to full-time work, her
brother had taken over the father as the “computer buff,” the computer had been upgraded,
and Megan had begun secondary school—it is the constancies that were more striking in
this close, quiet family. Lively and chatty as ever, grungy if not quite a teenager yet, Megan
still reads and writes stories—now on the computer, using the AOL story-writing option on
the kids’ page. She still searches for homework or leisure-related interests, now using Google.
As before, she follows her interest in animals onto the internet—for example, using Neopets
to name and keep a pet.6She’s become a fan of The Sims, visiting the Sims Web site and
sites with game cheats and, having gained a taste for horror, she enjoys playing “against the
grain” by murdering her Sims and writing gothic tales of murder and destruction.7Yet, as
before, her online skills seem more limited than her confident talk suggests. She had lost the
password for her “neopet,” nor could she manage to get the Web master to e-mail it to her.
She now has an e-mail and instant messenger account, but rarely uses it, and there is nothing
in her inbox when she looks. She ignores invitations on sites to chat, vote, or e-mail. When
I ask what is listed under “favorites,” she says she does not know, having never looked, and
when something goes wrong, she skims over the problem rather than stopping to figure out
what happened. So though her online style is quick and competent, getting where she wants
efficiently, her range is narrow, with little exploration. In addition, there seems little need to
worry about online risks, for Megan has internalized the caution once explicitly impressed
on her by her parents.
Megan’s internet use illustrates several key features of the online experience—a continuity
in interests offline and online (pets, stories), a continuity in individual learning style and
family mediation over time (from child to teen), the gap between parental pride in a child’s
expertise and his or her ability to make the technology do what he or she wants it to, and
parental ambivalence over the fact that encouraging confident exploration online also makes
a child vulnerable to online risks. Although all of these features of internet use are supported
by social science research,8research also shows that not all young people are as cautious as
Megan in their online experience, as the next case study illustrates.
Fifteen-year-old Anisah is from a Ghanaian family and lives on a once-very troubled hous-
ing estate. We first visited Anisah, a middle child, lively and confident, when she was 12. The
family lived in a small two-bedroom flat, the computer squeezed into the living room along
with most other family activities. Her educated parents had not found work in the U.K. that
matched their qualifications, leading them to place huge educational expectations on their
three children—evident in their many encyclopedias and educational CD-ROMs, the empha-
sis placed on homework and computer access, and the parental support for children’s offline
and online learning. At 12, Anisah was active and outgoing—she danced, played netball,
shopped, and socialized through the church—but as she lived far from her school friends
and was often alone, she also used the internet on most days, enjoying making friends in
chat rooms, liking to feel ahead of her classmates (most of her peers didn’t have home ac-
cess). Though she benefited from using the internet to research school projects (using Yahoo,

104 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
Excite, or BBC Online), her skills were imperfect: she told us about doing a project on China
(the country) for which she needed an illustration; she searched, downloaded, and inserted
into her work a picture of china (porcelain) from a Web site in Maine, United States, not
realizing the problem.9
Anisah at 15 had become a charming, strong-minded, articulate teenager, doing well at
school and hoping to become a designer. Having moved to a new house, she and her sister
now have a bedroom to themselves and, to her delight, this also houses the computer. Inter-
estingly, the family’s serious, moral attitude has become even stronger in Anisah. Unusually
for her age group, Anisah reads the news on the homepage of her ISP. She revises for exams
online using the BBC’s Bitesize. We discuss how—unlike her peers—she refuses to download
music, it being both illegal and wrong. She claims to have seen no pornography, though her
mother worries about this, checking up on Anisah and so invading her privacy, as Anisah
sees it. The interview with her mother pinpoints an ambivalence between saying “children
are children” who require guidance and seeing Anisah as part of the “guru generation” who
know about the internet. Though she uses e-mail and instant messaging programs, often
chatting to her friends late into the night (a practice of which her mother is unaware),
Anisah is now scathing about chat rooms because of the risk from dangerous contacts and
because chatting to strangers seems pointless (reflecting a widespread campaign in the U.K.
about the risks of chatrooms).10 Much of her internet use is purposeful—to research art work
for a project, to follow her interest in design, to find a cheap flight, and so forth.
From Anisah’s experience, we can add to the picture gleaned from observing Megan. Being
both older and more experienced, Anisah has bypassed some of the struggles Megan has with
accessing online content, but this means she faces the next level of challenge—what exactly
did Anisah need to know about the porcelain pictures to avoid her mistake? And, did the
mistake result from her poor searching skills (i.e., using an ambiguous search term, “china”)
or her assessment of the Web site’s content and reliability (finding a commercial site on
the wrong topic) or, even, a problem occasioned by poor Web site design or search engine
algorithms? One also wonders what complementary knowledge would be required by the
teacher, if he or she is to detect such a mistake and, in school, how the teacher could have
better advised Anisah. Internet literacy surely is not simply a feature of the individual, but
rather emerges (or fails to emerge) from the interrelation between individual skill, education,
and interface design, a point I shall develop below. Anisah’s case also shows the importance
of family background in shaping internet use—her parents’ cultural capital compensates for
their lack of economic capital11 in helping Anisah “get ahead,” a motivation held, but not
always achieved, by many parents for their children;12 as Anna’s mother said, “I think from
the children’s point of view they are so incredibly lucky to be able to have the information in
their dining room . . . and I think they are at an incredible advantage to other children. Not
every family has got a computer, and I think children are disadvantaged if they don’t.” Less
typically, though characteristic of religious families, Anisah’s parents’ strong moral values
guide and restrict the nature of her online activities in a manner that, for the most part,
she accepts.13 Where Anisah diverges from her parents—in seeking covert opportunities for
peer-to-peer communication, she reminds us that literacy encompasses all skills—both those
approved of by adults and those disapproved of.14
My third case adds further dimensions to our growing account of youthful internet use:
Ted was 14 when we first visited. More affluent than either Megan or Anisah, Ted is privately
educated and lives in a white, middle-class family. Perhaps because he is an only child and
dyslexic, Ted is rather overprotected at home; he watches a lot of television, though he also

Internet Literacy 105
spends time playing sports and out with friends. Education seems less emphasized in this
household except as a means to gain a comfortable lifestyle. Like many children, Ted cannot
remember a time before the family had a computer, though the internet is recent. Unlike
many others, he does not profess much expertise about these technologies. “I haven’t got a
clue,” he said, when things go wrong. Indeed, being a computer consultant, his mother is the
expert at home, guiding Ted in his use of the internet. She bookmarked the BBC’s Bitesize
for him, though he does not use it, and also checks the history file to see what he does
online. Indeed, internet use in this family is fairly social, with a parent often in the study
while Ted researches his homework online or plays games, and he also goes online with his
friend and internet “guru,” Ted following Mark’s lead.15 They check on their favorite stars,
television programs, sports stuff, send jokey e-mails to their mates, and they visit Yahoo
Chat—pretending to be older, to be other people, to meet girls. For Ted, the internet is
mainly “fun and funny, it’s good, frustrating sometimes”—especially in relation to effective
searching.
We revisited Ted when he was 18, about to go to university. Family life had changed, with
fewer family activities and Ted spending a lot of time in his room. Yet Ted still says that his
mother is better at using the internet than he is, particularly for searching (this seems likely,
when we observe his rather poor searching skills). And when we ask, he has little idea why
sites exist or what purposes they may serve. Like many teens, though unlike Anisah, who
considers it wrong, Ted now spends a lot of time downloading music via the peer-to-peer
file sharing system Kazaa while, multitasking, he conducts instant messaging with friends.
Again unlike Anisah, Ted hardly searches the Web at all now—only checking out university
sites for possible courses when he needs to; the internet has become for him a medium of
communication and music, not of information or education.
Thus, Ted adds further features to our growing insight into youthful internet literacy.
Regarding the discrepancy between economic and cultural capital, his is the contrary case
to Anisah. Where Anisah illustrates the hopes of those who provide internet access for the
otherwise disadvantaged,16 Ted shows that simply having the resources (financial, educa-
tional, and parental) does not necessarily get you ahead if a genuine interest in learning
and exploration is not cultivated early. Second, Ted’s use of the internet is more social than
either Megan or Anisah—where Megan takes turns with her brother on the internet, and
Anisah uses it alone or to guide her little sister, Ted goes online with his friend or his mother
and so gains from their greater expertise: literacy is, for Ted, part of a social practice, not
just a cognitive skill.17 Last, one should note that while Ted, like the other two, would ap-
pear to a superficial observer to multitask effectively, “whizzing around” in the manner that
impressed Anna’s mother, the benefits he gains from the internet are curtailed first by his
lack of interest in information, education, or exploration and, second, by his poor skills in
searching and evaluating Web sites, though one should not underestimate the importance
of gaining communication-related literacy skills, especially for teenagers.
Indeed, we can compare their adoption of the interactive potential of the Internet18 as
follows: Megan mainly uses the internet to search Web sites and play games—what Sally
McMillan (2006) terms user–document and user–system interactivity respectively.19 For Ted,
user–user interactivity (chat, e-mail) is more important. Anisah makes perhaps the broadest
use of online options, treating the internet as a more flexible and diverse tool. These three
rather different young people also share some common experiences: each, for reasons of gen-
der, class, ethnicity, or special educational needs, is partly on the “wrong” side of the digital
divide,20 challenged to use their skills and resources to overcome this and get what they

106 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
want from and through the internet. Each is treading a careful line between parent-approved
and child-favored activities, raising issues of domestic regulation (and its dependence on
national regulation), which balance freedom, safety, and privacy,21 and each is developing
valued expertise—“internet literacy,” though they seem more focused on making the inter-
face work rather than on developing the broader and more ambitious critical and creative
literacies that internet use affords.
Why “Internet Literacy”? An Excursion into Theory
To those for whom “literacy” means “just” reading and writing, the notion of internet lit-
eracy (or computer literacy, cyber-literacy, etc.) will seem puzzling. To nonnative English
speakers, the lack of a ready translation for “literacy” into some languages also poses a
difficulty.22 Raymond Williams (1983) traces the historical emergence of the English term
“literacy” not from “ABC” or “pen and paper,” but from “literature,” a term that once com-
bined the adjective meaning being discerning and knowledgeable according to “standards
of polite learning” with the noun for a body of writing of nationally acknowledged esthetic
merit.23 Today, as he observes, “literature” has come to refer only to the noun, with its as-
sociated adjective, “literary,” while by the end of the nineteenth century, “literacy” (and its
adjective, “literate”) “was a new word invented to express the achievement and possession of
what were increasingly seen as general and necessary skills.”24 Significantly, this new word
became necessary as the ability to read spread beyond the elite to the mass public, needed
to characterize the growing body of people with the skills to read and write but who lacked
familiarity with the literary canon. In other words, with the advent of mass education and
the commensurate rise of mass literacy, many people became literate but not literary, and
the “uses of literacy,” as Richard Hoggart put it,25 became increasingly subject to regula-
tory scrutiny and governance.26 Indeed, the advent of a literate but supposedly uncritical
public occasioned a series of “moral panics” accompanying each new mass medium (and,
today, each new interactive medium) (Drotner 1992),27 which focused precisely on the con-
sequences of access without discernment.28 Thus, the transition from print to audiovisual
media has been accompanied by widespread cultural anxieties, particularly regarding youth
that in turn position “media literacy” as a form of necessary critical defense against the
standardized, commodified message of “the culture industries.”29
In introducing these three children above, I have deliberately outlined an ambitious def-
inition of young people’s “internet literacy” that draws on the research literature so as to
encompass three dimensions. First, literacy is a form of knowledge with clear continuities
across communicative forms (print, audiovisual, interpersonal, digital). As regards the inter-
net, this knowledge poses a phased series of challenges, from initial hardware difficulties of
access through to more complex interpretative and evaluative competences regarding con-
tent and services that are distinctively afforded by (or socially inscribed into) the technology
or text. Second, literacy is a situated form of knowing that bridges individual skill and social
practices that is enabled (or impeded) by (unequally distributed) economic, cultural, and
social resources (or capital). Crucially, this emerges from the interaction between individual
activity, technology or interface design, and institutional shaping, and cannot be under-
stood solely as “a neutral technical skill.”30 Thirdly, literacy comprises a set of culturally
regulated competences encompassing both that which is normatively valued and that which
is disapproved or transgressive. “Internet literacy” in particular may be distinguished from
other forms of literacy to the extent that the specific skills, experiences, texts, institutions,

Internet Literacy 107
and cultural values associated with the internet differ from those associated with print,
audiovisual, or other forms of communication.31
Reviewing recent research on “media literacy,” a field that concentrates primarily on broad-
casting and audiovisual media forms, and that draws on both humanities and social science,
James Potter (2004) cites over twenty definitions.32 However, many of these broadly concur
with the clear and concise definition proposed by the National Leadership Conference on
Media Literacy held in the United States in 1992, namely “the ability to access, analyze,
evaluate, and communicate messages in a variety of forms.”33 In the parallel realm of infor-
mation science, the recent transition in the dissemination and management of information
sources, from authoritative and controlled forms (encyclopedias, libraries, expert databases)
to networked, diverse, flexibly specialized forms of representation of the information or
knowledge society, has positioned “information literacy” as a vital skill in the competitive
global marketplace. This field concentrates primarily on computing, telecommunications,
and information technologies, and draws on the study of information processing, computer
science, and library studies to theorize, especially, multiple levels of access competences,
to identify a range of barriers and enablers to access, and establish initiatives for training
or redistributing otherwise-unequal skills across the population. For, as Mark Warschauer
puts it, “the ability to access, adapt, and create new knowledge using new information and
communication technology is critical to social inclusion in today’s era.”34
Such an approach is, interestingly, strikingly parallel to that of media literacy.35 The
UNESCO-funded multinational gathering of experts organized by the U.S. National Com-
mission on Library and Information Science and National Forum on Information Literacy
stated that “information literacy encompasses knowledge of one’s information concerns and
needs, and the ability to identify, locate, evaluate, organize, and effectively create, use, and
communicate information to address issues and problems at hand.”36 In this document,
also known as The Prague Declaration, we see the same fourfold definition, now identified
as “a prerequisite for participating effectively in the Information Society” and “part of the
basic human right of life long learning.”37 So, with the widespread diffusion of information
and communication technologies, the notion of information literacy has been developed
to encompass the competences required to design and use complex digital systems for the
representation and distribution of information. However, now that the internet converges
multiple technologies, forms, and spaces of mediation and information—blurring hitherto
distinctive social practices of information and entertainment, work and leisure, public and
private, even childhood and adulthood, national and global—a convergence of media (or
audiovisual) and information literacies is needed to map out a constructive route to under-
standing what (young) people know, and need to know, regarding that deceptively simple
notion of “using the internet.”
Charting the Limits of Young People’s Internet Literacy
In thinking about young people’s internet literacies, both the traditions of media literacy
and information literacy are useful in recognizing the cognitive and social challenges posed
by access (to hardware, software, content, and services) as well as the dimensions of literacy
concerned with analyzing and critically evaluating content for its textual forms, genres,
biases, and reliability. Undoubtedly, Megan, Anisah, and Ted’s families are not alone in
their struggles to appropriate this new technology—even to choose, locate, and operate the
hardware, and deal with the constant and cascading demands to update and upgrade, let

108 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
alone to access the content and services accessible online.38 Megan’s computer was inherited
from her father’s workplace and so came set up with many puzzling features that remained
long after the computer had been brought home. Ted’s inability to bookmark sites also
limits his efficiency in accessing information, while Anisah’s attempt to obtain illustrations
of China shows the challenge of searching.
One observational session in thirteen-year-old Candy’s middle-class household clearly il-
lustrates the problems of access and its link to critical understanding and content creation.
Candy was trying to find a German Web site on food and drink to help with her school-
work. First she checked with her father that “du” is the German equivalent of U.K. He
says yes, then thinks it might be dr. This doesn’t work, so she tries www.esse.com.du.
This doesn’t work, so she tries .de, with no more success. The researcher suggests she
tries www.esseundtrinke.com.de but this doesn’t work either, because mistakenly she typed
“trinke” without the “n.” She notes that she couldn’t access the site at school either. The
observer suggests she puts an “n” in “essen” and she says that there should be one in “trinke”
as well, but no luck (perhaps because the words are run together as one—searching for “es-
sen und trinken” produces thousands of useful hits). Candy’s father then suggests .dr for
Deutsche Republik or “just to leave the last bit off and see if it finds it.” Neither works. Her
brother, Bob, comes across to try to help, but he can’t remember any German sites. Now
Candy is trying www.yahoo.co.du. Bob suggests Capital d, but still no luck. Her mother
then comes into the room and tries to help. She suggests they try .uk to see if “the whole
thing is working.” Her mother goes to the refresh option on the ISP home page. Candy jokes
“Don’t do that! It goes on to a porn page!” Evidently, once she did this and this happened.
She knows this must mean that someone in the house had accessed it earlier! The mother
tries www.yahoo.co.uk and immediately the page comes up. So the family conclude that the
problem lies with the name of the German site they are trying to access and is not a problem
with their skills; so Candy gives up. This whole process took ten minutes, and the attention
of the whole family.
Some of these difficulties have been effectively theorized within the information literacy
tradition where, as noted above, “mere access” has long been recognized as posing significant
barriers to many. In relation to media literacy, access has until recently been a minor issue;
turning on the television or radio, picking up a newspaper, or going to the cinema are not
challenging skills, oft-claimed to render these “democratic” media; although today, using
the electronic program guide, installing multiple digital channels, or accessing interactive
content raise questions familiar to those in the information/computer tradition. Where the
media literacy tradition is arguably more advanced than that of information literacy is in
relation to critical understanding. Mass media have been characterized by limited spectrum,
expensive distribution channels, centralized organization, and strong state regulation, these
combining to maintain a strong distinction between producers and consumers, with elite
filters operating to select material to be distributed in accordance with criteria of cultural
quality, editorial values, professional production conventions, and political or market pres-
sures. Consequently, media literacy teaching especially has often centered on understand-
ing and critiquing the operation and consequences of these elite public or private sector
organizations.
But, to the extent that the internet enables cheap, accessible, diverse, and dispersed forms
of knowledge distribution, the emphasis of critical literacy must be broadened to include
information searching, navigation, sorting, assessing relevance, evaluating sources, judging
reliability, and identifying bias. All these tasks increasingly fall to the ordinary user in a

Internet Literacy 109
fast-changing environment in which familiar markers of authority, value, trust, and authen-
ticity are lacking.39 Nor are these tasks inconsequential, for they are applied in domains ex-
tending far beyond the entertainment or hobby activities associated with traditional media.
Many young people find this exciting and empowering, affording diverse forms of expertise,
expression, and exploration,40 and the recent explosion of “user-generated content” certainly
attests to the appeal of gaining expertise in this new online environment. Many, however,
are less expert. In the “UK Children Go Online” survey, of those nine- to nineteen-year-olds
who go online at least once a week, four in ten said they trust most or all online content—
revealing, arguably, the scale of the challenge for media or internet literacy programs. For
the majority who are more skeptical, one must ask how they decide what to trust: only one
in three said they have been advised how to judge the reliability of online information.41 As
we saw with Ted, many have little idea of the motives that lead individuals or institutions to
make information available online, and when asked to speculate, those interviewed in focus
groups tended to assume benevolent and generous intentions to site authors. Steve (17, from
Manchester) told me sites exist because “somebody’s just thought this is my interest, and I’m
going to share it with the world.” So, critical literacy is a vital part of internet literacy, with
trust a central issue in navigating the online environment. Yet most children and young
people we interviewed in the focus groups appeared to be ignorant of the motives behind
the Web sites they were using, and many, it was clear, had not thought about this question
at all.
Moreover, the design of online resources often impedes the development of further skills or
competences online. Even at 18 and at a private school with great IT facilities, Ted struggles
to search effectively, typing in key words inappropriately, confused about bookmarking and
so always retyping addresses, and not understanding why you can’t always go “back” (itself a
good question).42 Similarly, why can’t Megan work out how to get the Neopets site to remind
her of her password? Since her teachers say she is an intelligent girl, perhaps the problem
lies with the site design? Certainly, as I observe her attempts, the lack of any site feedback
on her repeated mistakes seems a striking failure to encourage learning when needed.43 In
one visit, Megan (aged 12) shows me how the AOL kids home page offers a story-writing
option. The site contains a standard story with gaps—you insert your own name, that of a
friend, your favorite color, and so forth, and the result is a personalized story you can print
out. The discussion then turns, and Megan switches to Microsoft Works to show me the
story she is currently writing: this turns out to be a lengthy, closely written thriller, heavy
on dialogue and drama, containing tragedy, murder, a mysterious beautiful foreign woman
saying dramatic and intriguing things as she rushes about solving mysteries. The story uses
elaborate forms of expression, a complex vocabulary, includes exciting and witty writing,
if rather breathless and melodramatic. The same girl, two stories, one highly literate, yet
enabled merely by the blank page, one minimally literate and positively impeded by some
“creative” software.
Empirical observation of young people’s internet use suggests that, conceptually, we must
recognize that literacy emerges from the dynamic interaction between user and technology
and that, consequently, politically, we must take care in criticizing individuals for limits
of their online activities, for this is implicitly to assume that interfaces are well designed
and that necessary resources are readily available. In practice, interfaces also obscure, im-
pede, and undermine, especially in the new media and information environment where
cultural conventions of representation are not yet familiar, cues to interpretation are incon-
sistent or confusing, and a critique of the new information environment is underdeveloped.

110 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
Furthermore, young people’s internet literacy does not yet match the headline image of the
intrepid pioneer, not because young people lack imagination or initiative, but because the
institutions that manage their internet access and use are constraining or unsupportive—
anxious parents, uncertain teachers, busy politicians, profit-oriented content providers. In
recent years, popular online activities have one by one become fraught with difficulties for
young people—chat rooms and social networking sites are closed down because of the risk
of pedophiles, music downloading has resulted in legal actions for copyright infringement,
educational institutions are increasingly instituting plagiarism procedures, and so forth. In
practice, the Internet is not quite as welcoming a place for young people as popular rhetoric
would have one believe, and in this, of course, it is not so different from offline social
institutions concerned with young people.44
Convergent Literacies for Convergent Technologies
As audiovisual and information technologies converge, most notably but not only through
the internet, people’s skills and competences and, therefore, the research that seeks to under-
stand them must also converge. The traditions of literacy scholarship discussed above each
contribute to the analysis of internet literacy in complementary ways. Media literacy has
developed a better account of the nature of the sensory, esthetic, and symbolic qualities of
visuals, sound, and the moving image, and, therefore, of multimedia. However, it is heavily
linear. Information literacy has a better account of the nonlinear, the database, the dispersed
network. Since the internet combines these qualities, again we need to combine these tradi-
tions in theorizing internet literacy. This allows us to define internet literacy as the ability
to access, understand, critique, and create information and communication content online.
To be sure, this is a definition tied to a technology (or domain, namely, online), and the
technology is complex and changing, but this is not to fall into technological determinism,
for precisely since technologies have been socially and institutionally shaped, they afford
certain uses or embody certain preferences over others, and different forms of representation
pose distinct interpretative demands.45 Consequently, technologies invite or encourage the
development of certain competences in preference to others, both in terms of basic skills
(using a mouse, navigating hypertext, learning netiquette) and advanced skills (evaluating
aWeb site, contributing to a forum, inhabiting an online community). Thus, an interactive
focus on user and text or technology is vital.46
The subfield of human-computer interaction, interestingly, treats computer or informa-
tion literacy not simply as a skill, but rather as an interaction between skilled users and
well-designed interfaces.47 Similarly, the text reader model of interpretation (applied to both
film and television, and itself derived from the domain of print literacy) stresses meaning
as emergent from the activities of active subjects and polysemic texts.48 Indeed, there is a
thought-provoking parallel between the theorization of interactivity in the field of informa-
tion literacy (through the contrast between the “inscribed user” and the actual users, plural,
who interpret, normatively or otherwise, the meanings flexibly encoded into a technological
system49 and the theorization of the “inscribed subject” or “model reader” anticipated by the
text and the empirical audiences, plural, who decode or read against the grain when faced
with an audiovisual text in the field of media literacy.50 We may add to this the growing
literature on computer-mediated communication and its account of the specific communica-
tive literacies associated with online peer-to-peer interactions but drawing, historically, on
face-to-face interaction.51

Internet Literacy 111
Much in these converging traditions draws on a common origin in the analysis of print
literacy, particularly in the stress on interpretation (or literacy not just as reading the printed
word, but also as “reading the world”52). This legacy from print literacy remains crucial in
relation to the internet, much of whose content is, after all, print—along with the associated
reference frames of pages, reading and writing, sending, printing, looking up, filing, and
so forth; the question of how representation is altered as we move from page to screen
is a fascinating one.53 Other dimensions of the print legacy are also important: Gunther
Kress traces back to the dominance of print our cultural blindness to images compared with
words; for though the power of images is widely recognized, our analytic and regulatory
tools are more developed for words, hence the value of his development of an analytic
toolkit to recognize the visual (hence, he proposes the concept of “visual literacy”), for “the
exponential expansion of the potentials of electronic technologies will entrench visual modes
of communication as a rival to language in many domains of public life.”54 He reminds us,
further, of the important stress on writing in relation to print literacy when he observes that
“writing has been the most valued means of communication over the last few centuries—
the one that has regulated access to social power in Western societies.”55 It is especially the
dual emphases on writing as well as reading—preserved in the fourth term of the definitions
of both media and information literacy (as “communicate” or “create,” respectively)—that
has rendered literacy subject to close regulatory scrutiny. Not only does reading permit the
dissemination of knowledge in a manner that may escape control, but especially, writing
further democratizes knowledge in a move that challenges the authority of elites.56
Along with the emphasis on individual skills accompanying each new medium, histo-
rians identify an institutional (often, also a legal) history of regulatory interventions that
manage the dissemination and use of these skills, resulting in critical scholarship on how
the state intervenes—generally through educational institutions, though also the law and
other agencies—in what might otherwise seem the private activities and pleasures of private
individuals or private businesses (e.g., publishing, the press). Such normative concerns are
now evident in the initiatives funded in relation to ICT literacy. As for print literacy, the
purpose is often more to promote a skilled workforce, thereby advancing employment and
economic competitiveness, than to support a critical, informed, and actively engaged citi-
zenry. Hence, public policy resources are generally devoted more to enabling basic access
and understanding than to critical evaluation or user-generated content creation. Critical
scholarship must counter, therefore, by pointing out that the accepted definitions of media
and information literacy are not satisfied with just knowing one’s audiovisual “ABC”; one
must also be able to communicate—to create content as well as to decode it; otherwise, one
positions the public as mere recipients rather than also active producers and distributors of
information and communication.57 Yet the promise of literacy, surely, is that it can form
part of a strategy to reposition the media user—from passive to active, from recipient to
participant, from consumer to citizen.
Findings from the “UK Children Go Online” project suggest some positive prospects here,
though again, some disappointing realities. They suggest that young people enthusiastically
take the initial steps toward interactivity, communication, and participation, with some more
active than others, but often, they do not sustain the activity or engage as thoroughly as those
casually observing them might hope. For example, seven in ten nine- to nineteen-year-olds
who use the internet weekly report at least one form of interactive engagement with a Web
site (out of doing a quiz, sending an e-mail/SMS/picture/story to a site, voting for something
online, contributing to a message board, offering advice to others, filling in a form or signing

112 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
Figure 1
Explaining online opportunities and risks among teenagers.
apetition online), but on average, the total number of ways of interacting is 1.5 out of the
eight asked about, suggesting that despite the many online invitations to interact, adoption
remains low, especially among working-class teenagers. Similarly, the survey found that
34 percent of nine- to nineteen-year-olds who go online at least once a week have tried
to set up their own Web page—more often boys than girls, and more often older than
younger children (though younger children indicate that they would like to develop the
skills to make a site). While over a third feel that making their own site is in some ways
impressive, suggesting a considerable desire to be active and creative content producers as
well as receivers, closer examination showed that of these, one in three never managed to
get their Web page online, and a further one in three do not maintain their site—only one
in nine, therefore, have created, uploaded, and maintained a site, and among these, doing
so was often a requirement of their curriculum.
What might encourage a more ambitious use of the internet? The “UK Children Go Online”
survey findings revealed that online expertise matters.58 Measured in terms of the number of
online skills that twelve- to seventeen-year-olds claim to be good at, as well as their reported
self-efficacy, and assessed in terms of the range of online opportunities that the teenagers
engage in, as well as the range of risks they have encountered online, the findings suggested
that—as for learning to read or ride a bicycle—those with greater internet literacy take up
greater online opportunities and, perhaps more surprisingly, encounter more risks also, as
shown in figure 1. This diagram models the relations, direct and indirect, among demo-
graphic variables (age, gender, socioeconomic status), the quality (or variety) of the teens’
internet access, the level of their online skills, and frequency/length of their use, together
with the range of opportunities (e.g., education, civic participation, peer communication,
information search, etc.) and risks (e.g., pornography, race hate, sexual harassment, stranger
contact, or bullying) that they experience online.59
This empirical examination provides some encouragement for those who seek to overcome
the digital divide by intervening in young people’s internet literacy (whether via training,

Internet Literacy 113
education, online provision, or better design); increased literacy results in increased oppor-
tunities over and above the positive effects of access and use. However, it points to a problem
for policy makers and parents, for the positive correlation identified between the range of
opportunities and risks that teenagers encounter online makes it apparent that initiatives
designed to improve opportunities are also likely to increase risks, while those designed to
minimize risks may also reduce opportunities. Indeed, as the absence of certain lines in
the diagram conveys, access and use do not in and of themselves increase the likelihood
of online risks, and nor does literacy reduce it; rather, the online risks are the outcome of
online opportunities. The analysis also counters the technologically determinist view that
merely providing access to the hardware could be enough; for, while better quality of access
(e.g., more access locations, or having the internet for longer) was found to increase the range
of online opportunities experienced by teenagers, the more literate among them gained an
additional benefit over and above the less literate with equivalent access (or, indeed, equiv-
alent amount of use).60
As soon as we inquire, however, into what these online opportunities might and should
include, the normative character of internet literacy discussions becomes apparent. For so-
ciety must ask what expectations it has for young people’s internet use—what, in short, do
we hope for young people and how much should their internet use be supported through
institutional and other forms of support?
Internet Literacy as a Normative Project
Clarity over the purposes of literacy is often lacking, resulting in some crucially unresolved
debates in both traditions discussed in this chapter, bringing, in turn, an unresolved and
contested legacy to the analysis of internet literacies.61 In the media literacy tradition, sig-
nificant differences of opinion persist among theorists and media educators regarding their
valuation of the media themselves: How much emphasis should be placed on critiquing or
on appreciating media? One might here compare the notion of advertising literacy, seen
as providing a cultural defense against the normative messages of media corporations, with
that of film literacy, advocated for enabling a cultural appreciation of the esthetic, creative,
and pleasurable potential of audiovisual expression.62 This uncertainty in pedagogy influ-
ences, and undermines, the justification, implementation, and evaluation of media literacy
programs, whether through either media education or citizenship initiatives, an uncertainty
that now continues to shape contemporary discussions over the appropriate uses of internet
literacy.63 Similarly, information literacy advocates do not agree about the desired balance
between technical skills and information skills, or the importance of motivational versus
economic barriers to understanding, or the weight to be put on information literacy as a
means of competing in an increasingly information-oriented labor market or as a means to
participate fully as a citizen in the knowledge society. All these are debates, essentially, over
the politics of literacy and literacy education. Concretely, one may ask not only whether
Megan, Anisah, and Ted are “internet literate” but, also, what more should they know, and
whose responsibility is this?
Being able to use the internet is of little value in and of itself. Rather, its value lies in
the opportunities that it opens up, just as the history of debates over print literacy are, fun-
damentally, debates over the manner, inclusiveness, and purposes of public participation
in society.64 Ihave argued elsewhere that we can identify three broad purposes to which
media and information literacies contribute.65 First, democracy, participation and active

114 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
citizenship: in a democratic society, a media and information-literate individual is more able
to gain an informed opinion on matters of the day, and to be able to express their opin-
ion individually and collectively in public, civic, and political domains, while a media and
information-literate society supports a critical and inclusive public sphere. Second, knowl-
edge economy, competitiveness, and choice: in a market economy increasingly based on
information, often in a complex and mediated form, a media and information-literate indi-
vidual is likely to have more to offer, and therefore achieve at a higher level in the workplace,
and a media and information-literate society is innovative and competitive, sustaining a rich
array of choices for the consumer. Third, lifelong learning, cultural expression, and personal
fulfillment: since our highly reflexive, heavily mediated symbolic environment informs and
frames the choices, values, and knowledge that give significance to everyday life, media and
information literacy contribute to the critical and expressive skills that support a full and
meaningful life, and to an informed, creative, and ethical society.
These purposes are deliberately framed to capture both the individual competences and
institutional structures that, together, underpin literacy. For across diverse traditions, literacy
research has often been strongly contested for its individualistic emphasis on skill. Literacy
should, it is argued by these critics, be conceived as both an individual accomplishment or
asocial and cultural practice.66 Just as competences can be conceptualized at several levels,
from the basic (using the pen, the remote control, the mouse) through to intermediate skills
(finding a book in the library, identifying a reliable Web page, contributing to a forum) and
then to advanced competences (creativity, specialized learning, participation, and critique),
so too can the social structures that underpin these competences. At the basic level, then,
internet literacy is enabled by and depends on the design of interfaces, software, and technical
provision;67 at the intermediate level, literacy requires institutional supports (education and
other learning environments, accountable gate-keeping practices, well-resourced curricula,
and information resources); at the most ambitious level, internet literacy requires societal
encouragement both online and offline for democratic engagement, open and responsive
civic organizations, an innovative and flexible economy, and a rich and diverse culture. In
short, media and information literacies do not simply concern the ability to use the electronic
program guide for digital television, or to complete one’s income tax return online. Nor are
the purposes restricted to becoming a more informed consumer or getting a better-paid
job, though in methodological terms, these may be more readily evaluated against tangible
outcomes.
However, research within media literacy and information literacy divides on the politics
of literacy research. Some in the field of media literacy work within the administrative ap-
proach, in Paul Lazarsfeld’s terms,68 seeking directly to contribute to and influence policy on
media literacy (for example, tracking ICT diffusion and access via government or commercial
surveys). Other work takes a critical approach, exploring how people use media for their own
sometimes non- or counternormative purposes, or critiquing the authorities that seek to “im-
prove” literacy for administrative, economic, or commercial purposes. In the informational
domain, similarly, research is bifurcated. For example, research on the search engine in the
administrative tradition uses survey-based studies to examine access to and familiarity with
search engines, the skills of different types of users, or the sophistication of users’ search
queries. In addition, studies using ratings and metrics examine the demographic trends in
search engine choice and use, often to inform the advertising industry. Other research takes
a critical viewpoint, integrating economic analysis, observation, and experiments, to ques-
tion the adequacy of search engines for the public good, to critique the private structure of

Internet Literacy 115
the industry and its lack of transparency in information provision, and so forth. Thus, the
critical focus of the two traditions has been different. Media literacy—because of the focus
on the dominant institutions of the mass media—has developed a critical focus on the value
of media (appreciate or deplore, value culture or defend against harm), and an interest in
the public’s resistance to dominant meanings. Information literacy—because of its greater
focus on the challenges of access, and their associated barriers and enablers—has developed
its critical focus on in/equality, competition, and redistribution across the population. Both
these foci are, clearly, critical points of intervention for the academy in responding to so-
ciety wide initiatives to promote literacy of all kinds, including internet literacy for young
people.
Conclusions
This chapter has stressed the historical continuities between internet literacy and print lit-
eracy, in order that the ambitious expectations society has for print literacy (notably, the
importance of writing as well as reading, and the expectation of critical understanding at
levels far beyond knowing one’s ABC) can be extended to internet literacy in the informa-
tion age; for these not only support a skilled labor force, but also ensure cultural expression,
civic participation, and democratic deliberation. It has also noted the discontinuities, inso-
far as internet literacy poses some specific challenges, partly arising from the rapid pace of
change and the consequent reverse generation gap regarding children’s and adults’ expertise,
and partly arising from the unprecedented convergence of hitherto distinct spheres (public
and private, work and leisure, education and home, information and entertainment, etc.)
associated with the ubiquity of online technologies in developed countries; this, in turn,
demanding a convergence of diverse forms of literacy.
Given such ambitious expectations regarding youthful internet literacy, this chapter has
challenged popular claims regarding young people’s online expertise, not in order to criti-
cize young people themselves—who are undoubtedly enthusiastic, creative, and motivated
in their exploration of online opportunities—but in order to make visible society’s failure
to sufficiently support their internet literacy through design, education, and regulation. The
“myth of the cyberkid”69 or “the digital generation”70 (a rhetorical term whose technologi-
cal determinism David Buckingham, 2006, critiques) may mitigate against increasing public
policy resources to support young people’s learning and participation. It also seems that as-
serting children to be in control of their online experiences legitimates a deregulatory regime
that frees the market to the degree that it poses a risk to children’s safety.71 Undoubtedly,
the prevailing tendency in communications’ regulation across North America and Europe
is toward “lighter touch” regulation or, preferably, self-regulation for an increasingly global
industry. The consequent threat of harm to the public is countered by the claim that, con-
versely, such trends “empower” by providing more choice for an increasingly media-literate
public.72 To some degree, children are recognized as a special or “vulnerable” group in such
policy debates, but the favored solutions are not to sustain industry regulation, but rather
to increase educational initiatives to enhance media literacy.73 While media literacy initia-
tives are much to be welcomed, a critical analysis requires that we recognize these as part
of a broader shift from direct control by government to governance through “action at a
distance” regulating parents, for example, through discursively established norms of “good
parenting” and “appropriate children’s conduct.”74 One consequence is that this creates a
skills’ burden that parents and children neither can nor should bear alone.

116 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
Today’s connections between literacy, education, and individual responsibility are also
foreshadowed in the history of print literacy. Carmen Luke (1989) links the historical emer-
gence of discourses of literacy, child-rearing, and childhood to the confluence of the inven-
tion of the printing press in the late fifteenth century and to the “birth of the school” by the
middle of the sixteenth century.75 By the sixteenth century, she notes, “learning had been
removed from the home, the streets, or the community and had been replaced by an orga-
nized and regimented institutional setting where rewards, punishments, and the ideas and
skills to be learned were provided by an authority other than the more familiar and personal
authority of family and community members.”76 Intriguingly, it seems that today this trend
is reversed: public policy stresses putting learning back into the home and community, re-
sulting in what Buckingham, Scanlon, and Sefton-Green have termed the “curricularization
of leisure” and, partly in consequence, to the growing attention—public, policy, academic—
to questions of literacy.77 Both the removal from and then the reinsertion into the home of
education, socialization, and learning form part of the same larger trend, namely the institu-
tionalization of childhood, the incursion of the state into the realm of private life, including
the repositioning of children from being the private property of families into a public, civil
discourse.78
While the growth of state regulation over parents, children, and the home represents
the downside of this trend, the concomitant rise of an international discourse of children’s
rights by the end of the twentieth century represents the positive side. Optimistically, then,
literacy—including internet literacy—could represent a means of empowerment for young
people in a mediated world.
Victor Quinn defines “empowerment” precisely not as the provision of adult or predigested
information to children nor, simply, as free access to any information, but rather as enabling
children to be able to do what they can do best.79 In this view, it is not enough for adults
to leave young people to get on with it, but rather it demands that they listen, respond
carefully, providing feedback on creative or other forms of activity, encouraging critical
reflection, taking their participation seriously. Yet the form of “empowerment” adult society
provides through the internet is often a far cry from this: educational Web sites reinforce
“right answer” learning as opposed to critical questioning, civic participation sites encourage
youth to “have their say,” but rarely listen to or act on what they say. Many information
resources encode strategies of textual closure rather than openness—what Stuart Hall called
the “preferred reading”80 (frequently asked questions, recently asked questions, top ten lists,
fact of the week, our favorites, etc.), and “sticky” commercial sites, acting in effect as walled
gardens, tend to discourage the very exploration that a network structure could and should
afford.81
No wonder that what excites young people about the internet is primarily the peer-to-
peer opportunities it affords, in which they provide for each other the responsiveness, crit-
icism, humor, feedback, openness, and networking that so often is absent from content
designed for children by adults. Yet since information and communication technologies
increasingly represent a key route to education, health, civic engagement, employment
skills, participation in government, therapeutic advice, extended family relations, and so
forth, it is here that we must ensure literacy is sufficient. Celebrating young people’s en-
terprise and enthusiasm, while failing to support, respond, or engage with their online
activities, risks failing to bring to fruition the ambitious hopes we hold not only for the
internet but, more significantly, for young people. Overestimating their literacy is also haz-
ardous, because anxieties about risk are, to some degree justifiably, enhanced in the risk

Internet Literacy 117
society, and because support for the individual making these judgments (education, so-
cialization, and institutional norms) is reduced as the burden of responsibility is shifted
from provider to consumer, a process Ulrich Beck describes as “the individualization of
risk.”82
As more and more policy emphasis at national and international levels is placed on “media
literacy” or “information literacy” or “internet literacy,” critical scholars have all the more
reason simultaneously to support internet literacy initiatives, to assert ambitious expectations
in evaluating their effectiveness, to scrutinize the policy objectives that promote them and,
last, to challenge the inflated public claims regarding the “internet-savvy” teenager that
accompany them.
Notes
1. Quotations from children and parents are drawn from the “UK Children Go Online” project (see
www.children-go-online.net).
2. Marc Prensky, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, On the Horizon 9, no. 5 (2001).
3. While some see literacy as democratizing and so as empowering of ordinary people, many others
point to the uses of literacy as a source of inequality and so as elitist and divisive in its effects, including
the stigma of “illiteracy.”
4. Sonia Livingstone and Magdalena Bober, UK Children Go Online: Final Report of Key Project Finding
(London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2005).
5. Maria Bakardjieva, Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life (London: Sage, 2005); Thomas Berker,
Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie, and Katie J. Ward, eds., The Domestication of Media and Technology (Maid-
enhead, UK: Open University Press, 2006); Ellen Seiter, The Internet Playground: Children’s Access, Enter-
tainment, and Mis-education (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
6. Sara M. Grimes and Lesley Regan Shade, Neopian Economics of Play: Children’s Cyberpets and Online
Communities as Immersive Advertising in NeoPets.com, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics
1, no. 2 (2005): 181–198.
7. James P. Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003); Anne Jerslev, “Video Nights”: Young People Watching Videos Together—A Youth
Cultural Phenomenon, Young 9, no. 2 (2001): 2–18.
8. See Patricia Marks Greenfield, ed. Developing Children, Developing Media—Research from Television
to the Internet from the Children’s Digital Media Center, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 25,
no. 6 (2004): 627–769; Karin Larsson, Children’s On-line Life—and What Parents Believe: A Survey in
Five Countries, in Promote or Protect? Perspectives on Media Literacy and Media Regulations,eds. Cecilia
von Feilitzen and Ulla Carlsson (Goteborg, Sweden: Nordicom, 2003), 113–120; Amanda Lenhart, Mary
Madden, and Paul Hitlin, Teens and Technology (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project,
2005); Sonia Livingstone, Children’s Use of the Internet: Reflections on the Emerging Research Agenda,
New Media & Society 5, no. 2 (2003): 147–166; Ellen Seiter, The Internet Playground.
9. cf. Eszter Hargittai and Steven Shafer, Differences in Actual and Perceived Online Skills: The Role of
Gender, Social Science Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2006): 432–448; Marcel Machill, Christoph Neuberger, and
Friedemann Schindler, Transparency on the Net: Functions and Deficiencies of Internet Search Engines,
Info—The Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunications 5, no. 1 (2003): 52–74.
10. Sonia Livingstone, Online Freedom & Safety for Children (London: IPPR / Citizens Online Research
Publication, 2001).

118 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
11. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984).
12. Keri Facer, Rosalind Sutherland, John Furlong, and Ruth Furlong, What’s the Point of Using Com-
puters? The Development of Young People’s Computer Expertise in the Home, New Media & Society 3,
no. 2 (2001): 199–219.
13. Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark, and Diane F. Alters, Media, Home, and Family (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
14. Sonia Livingstone and Magdalena Bober, Regulating the Internet at Home: Contrasting the Perspec-
tives of Children and Parents, in Digital Generations,eds. D. Buckingham and R. Willett (Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 93–113.
15. Maria Bakardjieva, Internet Society.
16. Lynn Clark, Challenges of Social Good in the World of “Grand Theft Auto” and “Barbie”: A Case
Study of a Community Computer Center for Youth, New Media & Society 5, no. 1 (2003): 95–116.
17. Brian Street, Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education
(London: Longman, 1995).
18. Sonia Livingstone, Magdalena Bober, and Ellen Helsper, Active Participation or Just More Infor-
mation? Young People’s Take up of Opportunities to Act and Interact on the Internet, Information,
Communication and Society 8, no. 3 (2005): 287–314.
19. Sally McMillan, Interactivity: Users, Documents, and Systems, in The Handbook of New Media: Updated
Student Edition,eds. Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 164–175.
20. Mark Warschauer, Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide (Cambridge, MA: MIT,
2003).
21. Sonia Livingstone, Children’s Privacy Online, in Computers, Phones, and the Internet: Domesticating In-
formation Technology,eds. Robert Kraut, Malcom Brynin, and Sara Kiesler (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 128–144.
22. In German, “Alphabetismus” means knowing one’s basic ABCs while “Bildung” means cul-
ture/education, reflecting a common separation from basic literacy from being educated or cultured
in many languages; more recently, the terms “Medienkompetenz” and “Internetkompetenz” are spread-
ing. In French too, basic literacy (“savoir lire et ´
ecrire”) is distinguished from advanced literacy (“tr`
es
instruit et cultiv´
e”). The lack of such a distinction in English gives rise to the problem that academics and
educators may call for advanced (media/internet) literacy education, but policy makers may translate
this into basic provision of skills training.
23. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1983).
24. Ibid., 188.
25. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).
26. Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: The Discourse of Childhood (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1989).
27. Kirsten Drotner, Modernity and Media Panics, in Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media,
eds. Michael Skovmand and Kim Schroeder (London: Routledge, 1992), 42–62.
28. As Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy, 333) wrote in the early days of mass broadcasting, mediated
communication seemed to permit “strengthening the hold of a few dominant popular publications on
the great majority of people,” driving out of business the quality papers and those catering to minority

Internet Literacy 119
interests, while generally reducing all content to that which appeals to the so-called lowest common
denominator.
29. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, in
Mass Communication and Society, eds. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott (London:
Edward Arnold, 1977).
30. Ilana Snyder, Critical Literacy, Learning and Technology Studies: Challenges and Opportunites for
Higher Education, in The Handbook of e-Learning,eds. Richard Andrews and Caroline Haythornthwaite
(London: Sage, 2007), 395–415.
31. One could, further, break down the different literacies associated with the diverse activities—online
games, communication, information, participation, and so on—afforded by the internet (as in games
literacy, communication literacy, network literacy, etc.).
32. W. James Potter, Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004).
33. Patricia Aufderheide, Media Literacy: A Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy
(Aspen, CO: Aspen Institute, 1993); William G. Christ and W. J. Potter, Media Literacy: Symposium,
Journal of Communication 48, no. 1 (1998).
34. Mark Warschauer, Technology and Social Inclusion,9.
35. Sonia Livingstone, Elizabeth van Couvering, and Nancy Thumim, Converging Traditions of Research
on Media and Information Literacies: Disciplinary and Methodological Issues, in Handbook of Research
on New Literacies,eds. Donald Leu, Julie Coiro, Michele Knobel, and Colin Lankshear (Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, in press).
36. Information Literacy Meeting of Experts, “The Prague declaration: Towards an informa-
tion literate society,” 2003. http://www.nclis.gov/libinter/infolitconf&meet/post-infolitconf&meet/
PragueDeclaration.pdf (accessed June 8, 2007).
37. Ibid.
38. Andr´
eH.Caron, Luc Giroux, and Sylvie Douzou, Uses and Impacts of Home Computers in Canada:
A Process of Reappropriation, in Media Use in the Information Age: Emerging Patterns of Adoption and
Consumer Use, eds. Jerry L. Salvaggio and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1989), 147–162; Sonia Livingstone, Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media
Environment (London: Sage, 2002).
39. Barbara Warnick, Critical Literacy in a Digital Era: Technology, Rhetoric and the Public Interest (Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002).
40. Henry Jenkins, Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Partic-
ipatory Culture, in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, eds. David Thorburn and H.
Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 281–312; Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden, Teen Con-
tent Creators and Consumers (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005); Sharon R.
Mazzarella, ed., Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity (New York: Peter Lang,
2005).
41. Sonia Livingstone and Magdalena Bober, UK Children Go Online.
42. Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski, Designing From Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engi-
neers can Collaborate to build a Co-operative Technology (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2002).
43. Richard Smith and Pamela Curtin, Children, Computers and Life Online: Education in a Cyber-
world, in Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era,ed. I. Snyder (London: Routledge, 1998),
211–233.

120 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
44. Jens Qvortrup, Childhood and Modern Society: A Paradoxical Relationship, in Childhood and Parent-
hood,eds. Julia Brannen and Margaret O’Brien (London: Institute of Education, University of London,
1995), 189–198.
45. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology,2nd ed. (Buckingham,
UK: Open University Press, 1999); Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, and Wenhong
Chen, The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism, Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication 8, no. 3 (2003).
46. Jonas Fornas, Kajsa Klein, Martina Landendorf, Jenny Sunden, and Malin Svenigsson, eds., Digital
Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet (New York: Peter Lang, 2002);
McMillan, Interactivity: Users, documents, and systems.
47. Isaacs and Walendowski, Designing From Both Sides; Klaus Bruhn Jensen, ed., Interface://Culture: The
World Wide Web as Political Resources and Aesthetic Form (Frederiksberg, Denmark: Samfundslitteratur
Press/Nordicom, 2005).
48. Umbert Eco, Introduction: The Role of the Reader, in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the
Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1979; John Fiske, Television Culture (Lon-
don: Methuen, 1987); Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, in Culture, Media, Language,eds. S. Hall, Dorothy
Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
49. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological
Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Wanda Orlikowski, Learning from Notes: Organizational
Issues in Groupware Implementation, The Information Society 9, (1993): 237–250; Steven Woolgar, Tech-
nologies as Cultural Artifacts, in Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities,ed.
Bill Dutton (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 87–102.
50. Sonia Livingstone, The Challenge of Changing Audiences: Or, What is the Audience Researcher
to do in the Internet Age? European Journal of Communication, 19, no. 1 (2004): 75–86; David Morley,
Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992).
51. Brian H. Spitzberg, Preliminary Development of a Model and Measure of Computer-Mediated Com-
munication (CMC) Competence, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, no. 2 (2006): Article
12; John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity,
1995).
52. Paolo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, MA:
Bergin and Garvey, 1987).
53. I. Snyder, ed., Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era (London: Routledge, 1998).
54. Gunther Kress, Visual and Verbal Models of Representation on Electronically Mediated Communi-
cation: The Potentials of New Forms of Text, in Page to Screen: Taking Literacy Into Electronic Era, ed. I.
Snyder (London: Routledge, 1998), 53–79.
55. Ibid., 55.
56. Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism.
57. Content creation, is not just an optional extra: Article 13 of The UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child states that “The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include
freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either
orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” See
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/k2crc.htm (accessed January 12, 2007).
58. In the survey of 1511 nine to nineteen year olds and 906 parents, neither children nor parents
claimed great expertise, though children claimed more than their parents: 28 percent of parents, and 7

Internet Literacy 121
percent of children, who use the internet described themselves as beginners; 12 percent of parents and
32 percent of children considered themselves advanced users (Livingstone and Bober, UK Children Go
Online).
59. Sonia Livingstone and Ellen Helpser, The Role of Internet Literacy in Mediating Online Opportunities
and Risks Among Teenagers (manuscript under review).
60. Access, predictably, is strongly influenced by demographic factors, with boys, and older or middle
class teens having better quality access and so, as a result, using the internet more and gaining more
skills and more opportunities online, see Livingstone and Bober, UK Children Go Online.
61. Douglas Kellner, New Media and New Literacies: Reconstructing Education for the New Millennium,
in The Handbook of New Media,eds. L. Lievrouw and Livingstone (London: Sage, 2002), 90–104; Kathleen
Tyner, Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1998).
62. Cary Bazalgette, Making Movies Matter (London: British Film Institute, 1999), www.bfi.org.uk; Toby
J. Hindin, Isobe R. Contento, and Joan D. Gussow, A Media Literacy Nutrition Education Curriculum
for Head Start Parents About the Effects of Television Advertising on Their Children’s Food Requests,
Journal of the American Dietetic Association 104, no. 2 (2004): 192–198.
63. Rene Hobbs and Richard Frost, Measuring the Acquisition of Media-Literacy Skills, Reading Research
Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2003): 330–355; Yves Laberge, Media Literacy and Public Citizens, European Journal
of Communication 19, no. 2 (2004): 249–253.
64. Freire and Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word;Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism;Warnick,
Critical Literacy in a Digital Era.
65. Livingstone et al., Converging Traditions of Research.
66. Street, Social Literacies; Snyder, Literacy, Learning and Technology Studies.
67. In Livingstone et al., (in press), we suggest the concept of content legibility to mirror that of user
literacy, noting that if a book is badly written or typeset, we do not call the reader illiterate but we are
critical of the book—its producers, its form or its address. Similarly, if the news provides no accessible
information about its sources, fails in journalistic conventions of objectivity, or is inconsistent in its
editorial policy, we do not say the viewer is at fault in struggling to evaluate the message, rather, we
point the finger at the broadcaster, the newsroom, the text. If a search engine appears to offer unbiased
access to information resources while operating with commercial priorities invisible to the user, again
we do not ridicule users for failing to discern this and so misunderstanding the value of the information
obtained.
68. Paul Lazarsfeld distinguished the approaches of positivist or liberal scholars from those in the
Marxist tradition, defining administrative research as that which “is carried out in the service of some
kind of administrative agency of public or private character” while critical research “is posed against the
practice of administrative research, requiring that .. . the general role of our media of communication in
the present social system should be studied.” His purpose was to distinguish research that takes its agenda
from, and produces recommendations useful for, public policy or commercial gain, from research that
maintains a critical independence from established institutions. The former takes on the responsibility of
actively shaping social and technological change; the latter seeks to produce independent knowledge that
critiques the strategic activities of the establishment. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Remarks on Administrative
and Critical Communications Research, Studies in Philosophy and Science 9(1941): 3–16.
69. Keri Facer and Ruth Furlong, Beyond the Myth of the “Cyberkid”: Young People at the Margins of
the Information Revolution, Journal of Youth Studies 4, no. 4 (2001): 451–469.

122 Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected
70. David Buckingham, Is there a Digital Generation?, in Digital Generations,eds. David Buckingham
and Rebekah Willett (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 1–13.
71. Livingstone and Bober, Regulating the Internet at Home; Janis Wolak, Kimberly J. Mitchell, and
David Finkelhor, Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years on (University of New Hampshire: National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 2006).
72. Andrea Millwood Hargrave and Sonia Livingstone, Harm and Offence in Media Content: A Review of
the Evidence (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2006).
73. For example, the UK Communications Regulator has a legal duty to promote media literacy. Yet it
is set up primarily as an economic regulator, see Robert W. McChesney, The Internet and U.S. Com-
munication Policy-making in Historical and Critical Perspective, Journal of Communication 46, no. 1
(1996): 100. Thus Robert McChesney worries that a focus on literacy distracts policy makers and cultural
critics from questions of power; as he puts it, the question is less what people do with the technol-
ogy than “who will control the technology and for what purpose?” Notwithstanding such justified
skepticism, see The Council of Europe, Integration and diversity: The new frontiers of European me-
dia and communications policy, March 10–11, 2005, http://www.coe.int/T/E/Com/Files/Ministerial-
Conferences/2005-kiev/texte adopte.asp, with many good intentions, developing policy that will “give
special encouragement to training for children in media literacy, enabling them to benefit from the
positive aspects of the new communication services and avoid exposure to harmful content” and
“support steps to promote, at all stages of education and as part of ongoing learning, media literacy
which involves active and critical use of all the media, including electronic media.” The European
Commission’s Audiovisual and Media Policy also supports a broad conception of media and informa-
tion literacies; see http://www.ec.europa.eu/comm/avpolicy/media literacy/index en.htm (accessed Jan-
uary 12, 2007). http://www.ec.europa.eu/comm/avpolicy/media literacy/expert group/index en.htm. In
North America, the Center for Media Literacy (http://www.medialit.org/), the Media Literacy Clearing-
house (http://www.medialit.med.sc.edu/), Citizens for Media Literacy (http://www.main.nc.us/cml/),
the Alliance for a Media Literate America (http://www.amlainfo.org/home/our-members/organizations/
academic-institutions), and the Association for Media Literacy in Canada (http://www.aml.ca/home/)
all seek to promote media literacy.
74. David Oswell, The Dark Side of Cyberspace: Internet Content Regulation and Child Protection.
Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5, no. 4 (1999): 42–62.
75. Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism.
76. Ibid., 131.
77. David Buckingham, Marjorie Scanlon, and Julian Sefton-Green, Selling the Digital Dream: Marketing
Educational Technology to Teachers and Parents, in Subject to Change: Literacy and Digital Technology,
eds. Avril Loveless and V. Ellis (London: Routledge, 2001), 20–40.
78. Howard Gadlin, Child Discipline and the Pursuit of Self: An Historical Interpretation, in Advances
in Child Development and Behavior, eds. Hayne W. Reese and Lewis P. Lipsitt (New York: Academic Press,
1978), 12: 231–261.
79. Victor Quinn, Critical Thinking in Young Minds (London: David Fulton Publishers, 1997).
80. Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding.
81. cf. Livingstone, 2002; Snyder, Page to Screen.
82. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).