However, there has always been a strong boundary between the knowledge(s) produced within society and the knowledge that has been taught through official instruction in educational institutions. This is partly because education has been expected to fulfil a range of often competing functions which extend well beyond the passing on of knowledge.

Table 1.0 Typology of forms of knowledge

Schools have always taught and transmitted a selected range of knowledge according to the social, political and economic needs that are perceived to be important in a specific era. As Hargreaves points out:

Since the emergence of compulsory schooling and its spread across the world, state education has repeatedly been expected to save society. Schools and their teachers have been expected to rescue children from poverty and destitution; rebuild nationhood in the aftermath of war; to develop universal literacy as a platform for economic survival; to create skilled workers even when little suitable employment has beckoned them; to develop tolerance among children where adults are divided by religious and ethnic conflict; … to eliminate drugs and violence and make restitution for the sins of the present generation by reshaping how education prepares the generations of the future.’ (Hargreaves, 2003, p3)

Thus the purposes of education are multiple, although we might identify three elements: to foster a particular kind of citizenry, to prepare a future workforce, and to provide young people with ways to reflect on and navigate pathways through life. These purposes are not necessarily compatible and in different eras and circumstances some, yet not others, may be prioritised. Furthermore, rather than being able to ’save society’ it has to be recognised that learning takes place in social contexts that cannot be fully insulated from the social, economic and personal situations in which young people experience life. There is a growing sense that educational institutions need to be more open to the experiences that young people have if they are to foster successful learning, especially for groups whose everyday lives are insecure, chaotic and limited due to poverty and other forms of disadvantage. Young people who are secure, safe and materially comfortable are likely to benefit from education in whichever institution they find themselves. Schools can probably make the greatest difference to groups whose everyday lives are marked by disadvantage. Yet, such groups historically gained access to formal schooling later than groups with higher socio economic status (SES) and so traditionally have not been imagined as legitimate participants within educational institutions. A recent report publish by the Rowntree Foundation found that white, British boys from poor families (Cassen and Kingdom, 2007) achieve less well in secondary education than any other group including working class girls and Afro-Caribbean boys. A recent report by the Sutton Trust in conjunction with the LSE found ‘that social mobility has stagnated and is at its lowest point for decades’ (ibid., 2007). Furthermore forms of instruction have changed little across the long history of schooling. A ‘deep grammar’ has remained at the heart of schooling in which teaching is ‘conducted from the front, through lecturing, seatwork and question and answer methods, with separate classes of age-like children, evaluated by standard paper-and-pencil methods’. (Hargreaves, 2003, p4). Major challenges for education in the future will be to develop school curricula that are more inclusive and to broaden the repertoire of instruction (pedagogy) and assessment.

The school curriculum and working class groups

In the following section I shall describe the origins of the relationship between the academic curriculum and elite masculinity: that is, masculinity valued by groups with high SES. In this section I shall point to some issues that relate to working class masculine identities. There has long been a powerful association between masculinity, skill, and work of the body rather than of the mind in working class communities. Since the industrial revolution, being skilled was associated with being independent and being a good man (Schwartz Cowan, 1997, cited in Murphy and Whitelegg, 2006). Skills were learned in workplace apprenticeships and therefore were tied to specific fields of production and their earning power gave them value (Willis, 1977). Technical competence was associated with masculinity in opposition to femininity (Wajcman, 1991). Because the high status of manual and technical skills derived from their relationship with fields of productivity they were not associated with educational qualifications (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007 p67). This remains a challenge when it comes to teaching work related skills within schools (Brown, 1987; Brown and Lauder, 1992, 2001; Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Brown et al, 2001)

Debates about whether the school curriculum should be taught as subject content or skills including ‘technical skills’ and ‘life skills’ can be traced back to the end of the 19^th century (Barnes, 1982; Brent, 1978; Green, 1990; Green et al, 1995, 1997, 2003; Hirst, 1974; Hodkinson, 1998, 2000; Hogarth et al, 2003; Illich, 1973; Jones et al, 1995; Lawton, 1980; Lloyd et al, 2003; Moore et al, 1995; Pring, 1976; Young, 1977). However, the UK, in comparison to other European countries, has been slow to develop technical education as a specialist field requiring specific expertise (Green, 1999; Green and Steedman, 1997; Hobsbawm, 1968; Roderick and Stephens, 1978; Sanderson, 1994; Steedman et al, 1995) and the secondary school curriculum has remained dominated by subject content. There are expectations that the future workers within the so called ‘knowledge economy’ will be required to integrate forms of knowledge in order to act in an uncertain world with ingenuity, invention, initiative, flexibility and creativity (Brown et al, 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Hargreaves, 2003, Leitch, 2006). The gap between what is taught in schools and what will be required for the future appears to be widening as traditional canons, and ways of producing knowledge are changing due to the information revolution. The new skills based curriculum with personal learning pathways has been proposed as one solution to the disparity between practices inside and outside schooling.

The specific skills relating to workplaces are hard to teach in schools because the learning contexts need to replicate some of the conditions of laboratories, workshops and retail environments where specific skills are practiced, including the authentic production of goods that can be sold. It is easier for schools to teach generic skills, such as problem solving, communication, planning, and flexibility required for a wide range of occupations (Felstead et al, 2002, 2007). Such skills have become associated with the citizen-workers of the new ‘knowledge economy’ (DfEE, 2001b; DTI, 1998, 2001). These skills are meant to be delivered through all subjects and at all levels of the national curriculum in England and Wales, and referred to as ‘Key Skills’ in curricular documents.

As dominant political discourses struggle to change the nature of curricular knowledge, rhetoric about generic skills as transferable commodities is growing. We tend to talk as if knowledge can circulate like money. However, the notion that skills are disembodied and can be learned in any context irrespective of their relevance to such contexts is highly problematic. Bernstein (1990, 1996) has predicted that the focus on generic skills as transferable commodities has created an illusion that somehow skills can be removed from the person and from the process of knowing. The creeping shift in curricular knowledge towards skills-led qualifications points to a weakening of traditional boundaries (Bernstein, 1990; 1996) between school and work. There is a danger that the link between education and production will only be effective for the higher levels of education experienced mainly by groups with high SES. We are in danger of producing a new division of labour arising from the information technology revolution: those who work and those who train (Bourne, 2000, p42), with working class groups being prepared for a life time of retraining rather than a life time of employment (Jones et al, 1995; Willis, 1984).

I wish to argue in the following section that subject knowledge(s) taught in schools are cultural constructions that have long historical legacies. Any proposed or imagined shift in curricular content and teaching method needs to take into account the values, including class and gender values embedded within the cultural streams that make up the elements of the curriculum. Subject knowledge, such as physics or literature, was historically produced through practices that included and excluded particular social groups from participation in the construction of subject based, ideas, logic and meanings. These legacies remain active today (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Therefore when subject knowledge is made available to students in classrooms it acts as cultural material that provides resources for constructing social identities. For example, some middle class girls may find it liberating to gain access to historically male territories such as physics and mathematics, while some middle class boys may find that participating in domestic or vocationally oriented courses clashes with their endeavours to conform to high status masculinity within peer and other social groups. Yet, as Walkerdine (1988, 1990, 1998, Walkerdine et al, 2001) has shown even when girls cross into historically male, high status, territory there is a cost. Our ethnographic work backs up Walkerdine’s findings that when girls and indeed boys cross into knowledge territories that have the opposite gender value to their emergent gender identities, they experience conflict. Managing this conflict takes effort and requires support and back up. Schools can provide this support yet traditionally they do not because they are influenced by the historical legacies that associate certain groups with specific knowledge forms and not with others.

Curricular interventions that wish to shift the school curriculum in order to meet the needs of the future knowledge economy have to recognise the historical legacies attached to different forms of subject knowledge. The following section alludes to the cultural legacies of knowledge as a first step to planning curriculum change and to predicting which kinds of curricular intervention are likely to succeed or fail.

2.0 Knowledge and learning

Within academic institutions formal instruction is differentiate from people’s practical experience. The subject disciplines that make up school and university curricula can broadly be classified as ’scientific’ knowledge. Scientific knowledge, in contra-distinction to knowledge gained through personal experience, has publicly available criteria which govern how ideas are aligned within the discipline. These criteria are usually maintained by the communities that practice disciplinary knowledge and are often recorded in texts and manuals and embodied in the practices of members of scientific communities. ‘Scientific and common sense knowledge are often viewed as an opposition between abstract and concrete thinking’ (cf. Dowling, 1998). Universities and schools continue to value abstract knowledge over applied know-how. This distinction is maintained within the school curriculum as academic and vocational subjects. However the distinction does not reflect how people learn nor does it capture the way knowledge in any domain was, is and will be produced in the past, present or future. One of the major challenges for educational institutions will be to break down the hierarchy between abstract, applied and personal knowledge, in order to promote ingenuity, invention and creativity required for future ‘knowledge societies’ (Hargreaves, 2003). The classification of knowledge into the broad categories of ‘abstract’, ‘applied’ and ‘personal’, although useful for analytical purposes does not reflect the way people learn. Learning is a process in which knowledge, whether of mathematics or art, changes form as the learner encounters, absorbs and recreates knowledge. For example, coming to have abstract subject principles can be achieved through a process of continuous practice in which personal experiences provide the means for recognising and grasping unfamiliar concepts. There is a need to make a distinction between the classifications of forms of knowledge – the curriculum – and how knowledge is learned.

Learning is a process that takes place over time in which what is learned passes through many different states, including practice, making links, applying to different contexts and abstracting principles. Learning a subject in school can not be divorced from the personal experiences of the student (Lave, 2008). Even learning how to manipulate symbols in abstract systems such as mathematics involves desire, affect and personal investment.

The struggle over the curriculum and pedagogy has taken a new turn in late modernity as a battle between the world-view of the Enlightenment project and post-modern relativism. The post-modern turn rejects that there is a central meaning to the universe that can be discovered through scientific investigation and that instead there are multiple truths depending on the perspective of the learner/observer. This entails that in any situation there is no one meaning; there are multiple meanings. We are struggling to find pedagogic approaches that can do justice to the post-modern condition. If every voice is to be heard in the classroom then how will formal knowledge be produced? Yet if subject principles are imposed as rules then we risk alienating many groups such as working class boys, girls and minority ethnic groups who may not recognise the dominant code of academic culture (Bernstein, 1996; Keddie, 1971). One recent solution proposed by the Twenty-twenty Society is to individualise education so that each student has a personal tutor and sets their own learning targets. This places the responsibility for learning with the individual.

A socio-cultural approach to learning views the problem in a different way: not as a problem of individual identity, so much as a problem of culture. The emphasis is placed on the multiple settings that the student inhabits across the school day and week. Through their participation within a diversity of settings such as science, English and technical subjects such as Design and Technology, students develop an understanding of the specific codes, concepts and activities that belong to a diverse range of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Learning comes from becoming a competent actor in each community and it is the contrast between what is acceptable practice in one setting, such as the science laboratory, that enables to students to recognise what is acceptable within a different setting, such as a drama studio. Learning takes place as students move between settings and experience the specificity of the practices that belong to each community. Students have to develop identities reflecting membership in multiple subject communities of practice. Identity is as much about recognition and validation as it is about self expression (Duveen, 2001). How a boy or girl is recognised within a specific subject community of practice is marked by the legacy of who in the past was identified with that knowledge. These legacies exert an influence that can be referred to as the core gender-knowledge identities carried by different subjects of the curriculum (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Learning involves becoming a competent participant in multiple communities of practice within the school. Disciplinary and vocational subjects carry and offer pedagogic identities that have gender values attached to them. As students move between subjects they have to negotiate social identities based on the possibilities and restrictions offered within each community of practice. A socio-cultural approach recognises that learning is fundamentally social rather than an individual process.

The problem with reclassifying elements of the curriculum as skills is that it confuses two issues, namely the classification of knowledge and the process of learning. Given the deep historical roots attached to different elements of the curriculum, which are maintained and reinforced by elite universities, it is most unlikely that renaming subjects as skills will achieve any significant change in which groups achieve and which do not in a subject. However, the term ’skill’ suggests process as opposed to subject content and therefore appears to offer a useful way forward. However, instead of focussing on skill there is a need, first, to recognise how the learning process takes place, and second, to recognise that groups are differentially positioned with respect to subjects even before they enter the classroom due to the class and gender identities that are brought into school by students. These are not fixed identities although society sets up limits on how, for example, a working class boy can express himself if he wants to ‘get it right’ (Davies, 2003 pp9-10) as a boy in the face of peers, teachers, parents and the other social groups to which he wishes to belong (or not). Participating in a school subject has consequences for the construction of class and gender identities because subjects offer cultural material for expressing, performing and being recognised as the one ‘who is good at’, or ‘no good at’ activities. Activities such as ‘writing romance’, ‘using sanding machines in Design and Technology’, or ‘painting pink coloured flesh in Art’ are not class or gender neutral. To be seen painting pink flesh can be quite threatening for a working class boy (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p138-140). Students have to manage these identities and we have seen them protect themselves by refusing to participate in activities that challenge, for example, a working class male or an elite feminine identity. By recognising the historical roots and legacies of subject knowledge it is possible to take account of the class and gender associations that elements of the curriculum carry even today.

3.0 Class and gender connotations attached to curricular knowledge

Elements of the curriculum have class and gender associations that derive from deep historical legacies about practice, ie who had access to educational institutions in the past. Within educational institutions which class and sex groups had access to high status academic subjects and to vocational or other applied subjects remained at the heart of the school structure arguably up until very recently.

The hierarchical valuing of abstract knowledge within the academy can be traced back to the Greco-Roman curriculum inherited by Western Christianity. Manual practices were never integrated into ‘formal public systems of knowledge transmission’ but were passed on through family and guilds (Bernstein, 1996, p 22). The dichotomy and hierarchical valuing of abstract and applied knowledge goes back a long way. Greek society gave the Trivium (logic, grammar and rhetoric) high status and the Quadrivuim of applied knowledge (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music) lower status. The Trivium is the exploration of the ‘word’ or text. The Quadrivium is abstract knowledge about the structure of the ‘outer’ world, broadly speaking ‘mathematics’. The final set of subjects in the ancient curriculum, known as the mechanical disciples, included medicine and architecture which were dropped from the classification of formal knowledge in the 5^th century (Ovitt, 1987) and reappeared again much later. There was a strong classification of knowledge into mental and manual practice (Bernstein, 1996, p22). This distinction can also be mapped onto social representations of masculinity and femininity.

Elite or esoteric masculinity became associated with abstract knowledge. Cultivating interiority though practices of contemplation and meditation with the aid of sacred texts became central to the Christian tradition practiced in the medieval monasteries which were the first institutions of learning. Within the medieval monastery, monks and priests removed themselves from the mundane necessities of everyday life, dressed in sack cloth and denied the flesh and their appetites. Development of inner consciousness or interiority was privileged and the work of the body was downgraded. The mental-manual dichotomy has remained tied to social class distinctions. By the 13^th century this duality was reinforced by the total exclusion of women from the high offices of the church and hence from contemplation and the development of interiority. Woman became associated with exteriority, the world, caring, nurturing and containing. The idea of passive ‘mother earth’ as a realm which man manipulated and controlled remained central to how technology was imagined. Notions that girls are not technical still circulate today.

The Trivium dominated the secondary school curriculum from the first Grammar schools in the 14^th century up until around 1870 (Jarman, 1963). The resilience of school curricula to resist the inclusion of new subjects despite the rise of the scientific method in the 17^th century and the enormous advanced in engineering technology that fuelled the Industrial Revolutions is a remarkable phenomena and draws attention to the deeply conservative nature of school knowledge. The academic school curriculum remained divorced from the sphere of economics right up until the 1870s so that no one would have expected a grammar school boy to emerge from education equipped to take up his position in the world of work (see Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, pp75-76).

The most abstract systems of knowledge such as mathematics and logic carry strong masculine associations (Willis, 1989). If the Trivium aimed to forge a certain kind of citizen, it was most definitely that relating to elite masculinity to the exclusion of other social groups. ‘In the seventeenth century the discourse about the scientific method mapped versions of masculinity onto cultural representations of scientific ways of knowing and acting that were celebrated by the scientific community’ (Brawn, 2000, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p69). Abstraction, objectivity and logic became associated with masculinity and the mind.

Women and the working classes were not considered worthy of proper education until the 20^th century. Femininity became associated with the lived world, nature and holism. Because women were imagined as nurturers concerned with people, so they became less imaginable as scientists. Even today girls struggle with the conflict between the personal and caring values of femininity and being good at science and mathematics (Walkerdine, 1988, 1998). English did not become a subject in universities until the 1930s and up until then it was considered ‘fit for women, workers and those wishing to impress the natives’ (Eagleton, 1983 p29, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p76). The purpose of education for upper and middle class girls was further influenced by the strict demarcation of life into the public and private realms. This resulted in an education designed for no purpose beyond attaining a husband and the culturally valued accomplishments required to entertain his friends’ (Purvis, 1991, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p20). ‘These included conversational knowledge of some foreign languages, the ability to play musical instruments, to sing and to embroider. The greater the extent of her accomplishments, the greater a woman’s cultural capital would be in the marriage marketplace’ (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p20).

In contrast, working class children’s education was generally tied to their future lives as labourers and it was only recently that working class children gained access to an academic curriculum as a legal entitlement. This historical legacy created an allegiance between working class groups and non academic knowledge, ie knowledge gained though the family, guilds and personal experience. Before the Education Act of 1870 only a minority of working class children were in full time schooling and for girls it was approximately 10% of the female population (Purvis, 1991). Working class children were educated to spell and to read the Bible but not to write their own texts. If the masses could write, it was argued, they might be tempted to produce texts of their own (Hunt, 1972, cited in Robinson, 2000). If the masses could not write, the state could at least control the texts that they read.

Social class values are attached to knowledge domains and as with gender values they remain active in contemporary classrooms and are reinforced unwittingly by teachers. Furthermore, students choose to align themselves with particular subjects depending on where they feel they have a legitimate sense of belonging or allow them to express an emergent class and gender identity (Ivinson and Murphy, 2003, 2007). For example, we have found middle class boys limiting their involvement in Design and Technology as activities that activity aligns with working class traditions (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p112). The interaction between the social identities extended to students by teachers’ pedagogic instruction and the identities students bring with them into school as class and gendered citizens tends to reinforce the hierarchical stratification of subjects. Relationships between middle class boys with science and mathematics and working class boys with vocational courses, between middle class girls and the humanities and languages and working class girls with domestic vocational courses are strong patterns that can be detected in achievement measured by GCSE subjects taken and grades attained. Such longitudinal trends alert us to the conservative nature of educational institutional change. Despite speculations about new forms of curricula, such as skills-based curricula, the values carried by subject cultures are likely to be intractable and possibly may become further exaggerated over the next 40 years.

3.1 Present Curricula

Throughout the history of schooling social groups have had a differential access to and experience of curricular subjects. The notion that all students should have access to all subjects of the curriculum up to age 16, lasted for only a brief period of time, peaking with the national curriculum in England and Wales in 1988. The national curriculum in England and Wales made the full range of curricular subjects available to all students for the first time. The subjects of the curriculum were classified as core (science, English and Mathematics) and foundation (History, Geography, Modern Foreign Language Music, Art, Design and Technology, Physical Education, Religious Education)

Over the last decade a range of new subjects have entered the curriculum and there has been some relaxation on the compulsory need for all student to take all subjects. Some groups may be exempt from taking a Modern Language at GCSE. New subjects such as applied technologies have grown, as has generic training. The new applied subjects are assessed and accredited GCSEs or VGCSEs and are supposed to address skills in applied fields. In this new curricular organisation GCSE Art can be studied as a VGCSE in Applied Art and Design, and GCSE science as a VGCSE in Applied Science. Generic (training) pedagogies represent knowledge as a transferable commodity that has exchange value in the market.

The new 14-19 education documents signal a diversification in learning pathways to encompass academic, applied and vocational routes. This suggests a transformation of the ‘ideal’ student from one who can master ‘academic’ subject principles towards the new citizen-worker of late modernity who ideally possesses generic skills, flexibility and heightened individuality. New pathways to learning introduced in the 14-19 curriculum (QCA, 2000, WAG, 2002) such as Vocational GCSEs were part of a range of hybrid academic/vocational courses aimed at addressing the low status of ‘applied’ subjects. The increasing use of the term ’skill’ in curricular documents points to a weakened of traditional boundaries between school and work, (Bernstein, 1990, 2001). The multiplicity of new vocational courses in secondary schools is supposed to fulfil two aims: to re-engage disaffected groups, and to provide appropriate silks for the globalised economic market. However, we found that 13/14 year old boys still value traditional masculine skills rather than ‘generic’ skills (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007).

3.2 Future curricula?

It is most likely that over the next three decades elite universities will continue to exert considerable control over what counts as high status knowledge, regulated by entry requirements that will remain tied to academic subjects. It is likely that elite universities will continue to recognise academic rather than vocational qualifications for a range of reasons. Their allegiance will probably retain vestiges of the Greek ideal that scholars should learn to think before applying knowledge to the world. The main function of a university is to advance knowledge, and pure research requires some autonomy from the state and economic markets. The 1980s and 1990s have been characterised as an era of plenty that has seen the rapid expansion of the number of students in higher education. This increase is possibly not going to be sustainable in a coming era of scarcity. The school curriculum will probably not continue to be a purely academic curriculum as recent policy documents have pointed out. There will therefore be a further fragmentation of curricular knowledge. However, this fragmentation will be experienced differently by different groups. If strongly defined subject disciplines give way to hybrid knowledge forms this will probably not affect groups with high SES who will continue to follow a traditional academic curriculum.

For some students much learning in school is viewed as irrelevant and this is exacerbated in locales where there is high unemployment. In such areas even gaining certificates will not lead to a job making it difficult for students to invest in and feel any sense of belonging in schools. With the collapse of the industrial base and the scarcity of apprenticeships the group of students who find education irrelevant and who find it difficult to imagine viable economic futures will probably increase.

4.0 Changes in Pedagogy and Communication

The right hand column of table 1.0 lists the institutions where knowledge resides and is created. If knowledge is codified and recorded in texts which are stored and available in libraries and universities such knowledge is potentially available to all, even if access to books is variable. The capacity to store data in digital and virtual forms exponentially increases society’s ability to codify and retain information for future generations.

Knowledge that is codified and stored in texts is enduring and so accessible across a long time frame. Some ancient Greek and Roman texts are still available for scholars to access today. Universities are institutions that codify and record knowledge, and therefore are the sites where knowledge is produced, although this may be changing. The capacity to store knowledge electronically may well shift the central role of universities as the places where new knowledge is produced. The role of the WWW is likely to increase. One effect of the WWW is that knowledge becomes democratised: all citizens can potentially access ‘all’ information.

The subjects of the school curriculum were versions of university knowledge up until recently, before the curriculum became diversified to include vocational subjects and, more recently, generic skills. Such knowledge was passed on to the next generation via pedagogic instruction, usually a via transmission model. According to this model students are relatively passive recipients and teachers drill, instruct and explain subject principles to them. This style of teaching has been around for 4,000 years (Cole, 2003) and will remain a form of instruction in schools in the future.

A ‘child centred’ pedagogic intervention grew up in the 1920s and had some influence on the primary school curriculum after WWII, epitomised in the Plowden Report (1961). According to this model the child is viewed as an active learner who is given artefacts and problems to solve. Although this model has some influence on the primary school curriculum it has been far less prevalent in secondary schools. Although a transmission model has tended to dominate in practice students undertake a diverse range of activities in subject lesson only some of which are dominated by reading texts and writing. Practical work takes place in science, D&T, art, music and ICT, while independent research, project and coursework takes place in the Humanities, English, Modern Languages and Religious Education and Citizenship. However, assessment tends to be dominated by written test, despite the various attempts to broaden the media through which assessment takes place. The assessment practices in a subject will always have a strong influence on the pedagogic modality adopted by teachers.

In the future, new pedagogic practices involving virtual media, designed virtual classrooms and specialist software for teaching, for example, literacy and numeracy skills will be developed. These media will only dominate in schools if assessment practices also use such media. If university entry requirements change to incorporate electronic assessment tasks, these will rapidly become available in schools. However, due to the limitations of marking assessments electronically (eg multiple choice questions and answers) it is unlikely that elite universities will choose electronic marking in the near future. Electronic assessment for basic skills such as some literacy and numeracy skills is available and is likely to increase in schools for non-academic courses. Such forms of assessment are cheap, easy to apply and efficient. However, they can de-skill teachers and remove the human face of learning from disaffected groups who are likely to become increasingly disengaged. Once the novelty of working on a computer wears off, computer-based learning becomes mechanical and repetitive. The language laboratories introduced into secondary schools in the 1970s were heralded as a pedagogic break-through yet their appeal lasted less than a decade. There will remain a need for face-to-face human interaction in good quality teaching and learning. We may already be unwittingly further alienating disaffected groups of students by teaching through electronic media. Such groups are arguably those who most need human interaction as part of their learning.

The growth of online discussion fora for mature learners has been developed and is likely to increase. Many young people already use online chat rooms and fora such as Facebook to do homework. Different groups of young people will have differential access to, and ability to use, such media including web 2.0 technologies to enhance their learning. The following section turns to this problem and links to changes in family structures.

5.0 Changes in family structures

We are moving ‘increasingly into second, third and even fourth partnerships with extended families of a complicated and demanding nature. The family as a supporting environment will change, though how is unclear’ (Harper, 2008, p4)

Already many students live between two and sometimes three households. Some children live in households with siblings from two, three or more partnerships. They have relationships with parents who live in different households and see them occasionally. Sometimes over the course of their schooling young people will live with a variety of parents in a variety of different households. The range of parenting patterns is becoming increasingly diverse. Some households are busy and noisy because there are siblings from two or three or more relationships, making it difficult for students to find the space and quiet to do homework. At the other end of the spectrum there are children who have stable parenting experiences and due to decreasing fertility rates parents can support their children with high levels of cultural and economic capital. For some children, preparation for schooling starts early and parents provide a higher level of learning support than in previous generations, because they have high levels of education themselves. There is a wide variation in children’s experiences of home life and parental support and this will most likely continue to widen. The gap between children in poverty and affluence is widening and will be exacerbated by differential fertility rates between social groups. In some socio-economic groups women become mothers early and in others late. Even although the population is not rising in the UK the pattern of fertility is different across social class groups. These trends suggest that childhood poverty will most likely rise.

One of the important issues for educational achievement is how much support young people get from home. Some parents are able to provide a range of support based on their knowledge of the education system, their willingness to structure time for homework and pay for tutors. Other parents lack time, financial resources and knowledge of the education systsm.

Access to ICT at home is likely to become increasingly important as virtual media are used for pedagogic purposes. However, access alone is not enough in itself to ensure educational support. Some groups of young people access ICT for leisure activities dominated by game playing. Other groups of young people use ICT to meet, chat and exchange information including homework information. However, it is likely that using ICT for educational support will not be spread evenly across socio-economic groups. In some communities the WWW is viewed with suspicion and is associated with pornography. In other homes access to the WWW is seen as an important source of information and children are encouraged to become ICT literate. There is a third group of young people, often boys, who are using ICT to create websites and fora for mobilising and exchanging information. These groups are practicing skills that will help them to gain high level symbolic resources and prepare them for jobs in the new creative, technological industries. This may change as the technologies become main stream. Middle class groups have been more readily associated with the creative aspects of literacy that allow them to construct new meanings while working class groups have tended to be given less encouragement to use literacy to assert autonomy, negotiate and create meanings. This pattern is likely to be replicated with respect to ICT literacy. Schools will be presented with a serious challenge to make ICT technologies and media available to groups with low SES so they can used ICT to mobilise, create and be inventive. Historical legacies suggest that only with enormous political will backed by considerable resources will this be achieved in the future. It is much more likely that ICT technologies will be used in schools to control disaffected groups (cf. Apple, 2000).

6.0 Discussion around the skills curriculum

Harper (2008) predicts a future skills shortage due to changing demographics. By 2020 almost half the population will be aged 50 and older, creating a mature population. There will be a shortage of young people.

The skills required in the global market are not the same as the manual and technical skills valued in traditional working class communities. Research points out that instead of motivating disaffected boys many school-based vocational courses have led to cynicism because they fail to provide boys with the skills needed for work or for their imagined futures (Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2008a and b). There is a mismatch between the ways boys recognise skill and the way skills are presented in school. The political intention to raise the school leaving age to 18 by 2015 places schools under increasing pressure to develop pedagogic practices appropriate to boys with low SES. If we are to re-engage this group of boys in school we will have to develop appropriate pedagogies that value work of the body and hand as well as of the mind (Arendt, 1998/1958; McWilliam 1995 cited in Bourne, 2000, p43). However, there is deep confusion over the meaning of the terms “skill” and “vocational”. According to Bernstein neither term can adequately provide a meaningful education as they are interpreted and instantiated in school curricula at the moment.

The increasing use of ’skills’ as a synonym for both VET and its outcomes – eg ‘Education and Skills’, ‘Learning and Skills’ causes confusion in policy and provision (Stanton and Bailey, 2005). Stanton and Bailey (2005) argue that blurring the boundaries between schooling and work may be counter-productive because the higher status academic qualifications, assessments and pedagogies will most likely dominate in schools and the vocational courses will lose their distinctive qualities and become ‘cheap’ training grounds for low level basic literacy, number and ICT skills (Bernstein, 2001, Bourne, 2000) or more pessimistically prepare boys for life long training rather than work (Keep, 2002, 2005).

In contrast to skills required by employers in specific areas of business, such as leisure and finance, ‘generic’ skills are said to be required by the citizen-workers of the new ‘knowledge economy’ (DfEE, 2001; DTI, 1998, 2001) and include flexibility and heightened individuality (Goldthorpe, 2003). In curriculum documents generic skills include literacy, number, and ICT skills on the one hand and communication skills on the other. These are skills that are supposed to be transferable between school and work. Prior research demonstrates however, that the contextual framing of skills dominates so that young people do not recognise skills acquired in one context when they move to another (Whitty, Rowe and Aggleton, 1994a and b). Research questions whether skills can be transferred between school and work places (Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2006, 2007, 2008a and b). The Nuffield Foundation Review of the 14-19 Education and Training has expressed serious doubts about the quality and relevance of the learning experience for low achieving young people following vocational courses (Nuffield, 2008a). Early research suggests that “vocational” aspects of vocational courses get diluted in schools due to lack of resources and expertise (Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2007, 2008a and b). It is costly to reproduce work place scenarios in schools. There is a danger that vocational courses will merely inculcate ‘generic’ skills that neither employers nor students value (Bourne, 2000).

Rhetoric about generic skills as transferable commodities creates a fiction that learning can be disembodied and disconnected from persons, bodies and communities of practice. Bernstein (1990, 2001) has predicted that the focus on ‘generic’ skills as transferable commodities will have the effect of removing the person from the process of knowing. Bourne points out that a shift to ‘life-long learning’ could replace productive work for lower class boys who will be expected to substitute training for work (Bourne, 2000, p42). One way out is to develop pedagogic practices that are distinctly different to academic pedagogies and the first requirement is to recognise the embodied element of skills learning (McWilliam, 1995, cited in Bourne, 2000, p43). There is a need to make visible the full range of practices that are required for learning to take place. Learning requires work of the body, mind and head even if the balance is differently organised according to curricular subject. For example, training in the scientific method requires learning to ‘look’ at phenomena in new ways. This practice requires training the eye, the body and the mind.

7.0 Future scenarios of schooling

In the following future scenarios I have taken account of changing knowledge forms, demographic shifts, an increasingly diverse range of curricular forms, pedagogic modalities and changes in family structures. I am assuming that scarcity will replace plenty.

Key drivers

• As the gap between the rich and poor increases, so social differentiation will increase
• As family structures become more complex and more class embedded due to differential fertility rates between groups, children will have very different childhood experiences
• Changes in knowledge structure and availability based on the information revolution will change the role of universities as the primary repositories of knowledge and a plurality of knowledge creating spaces will burgeon. However, knowledge hierarchies will be perpetuated and access to high status knowledge and rich pedagogic experiences will continue to reflect historical patterns that reflect social class and gender divisions
• The economy will be characterised in terms of scarcity rather than abundance which will make it increasingly difficult to fund high quality education for all students.

Given the long historical legacies attached to forms of knowledge outlined in section 2.0, I have assumed that some aspects of schooling will not change’ for example, high status knowledge will remain text and discourse based rather than virtual, access to elite universities will remain restricted ensuing that the academic curriculum will not become skills-based, and the need for face to face human interaction in learning will not be replaced by virtual pedagogies in academic curricula. A series of hierarchies will endure between elite and low status forms of knowledge that can be traced to deep historical legacies. For example, access to high and low status forms of knowledge will continue to reflect class and gender patterns.

Scenario 1

This scenario reflects increasing diversification in times of scarcity. A decrease in young people by 2020 will require fewer schools making the possibilities of providing a diverse range of schools in a locale unlikely. The broad range of subjects on offer in secondary schools will settle into three broad streams reflecting the old tripartite education system. An elite academic curriculum will be available to a minority, a mixed academic and technically oriented curriculum will be available for the majority and a vocational and skills based curriculum will be available to the remaining group. However, scarce resources will ensure that the academic curriculum will remain traditional with the development of relatively few virtual pedagogic tools. The vocational curriculum will not develop pedagogies to teach trades and crafts authentically. Instead there will be an increasing reliance on virtual pedagogic tools to drill students in basic literacy and numeracy skills. Schools remain relatively insulated from the economic market. Elite students continue to be taught to think, the majority will receive a broad and balanced curriculum as outlined in the National Curriculum 1988 Act, and the third group will receive a watered down version of vocational education focussing on basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Scenario 2

In a time of scarcity this educational scenario predicts increasing social disintegration. There will be a move towards a skills based curriculum. Disciplinary subject boundaries become blurred as the curriculum becomes defined in terms of skills and competencies. However, even although academic subject curricular documents will use rhetoric of skills and competencies they will continue to be taught as subject content aimed at teaching subject principles in relatively traditional ways. This conservation of a traditional academic curriculum will be driven by entrance requirements for elite universities. Even students following academic curricula will be required to take a minimal number of technical or vocational courses and there will be a rise in uptake of ICT-related and business management courses especially by boys. The majority of students will follow a mixed skills and competency led curriculum. This second group will become the knowledge workers in skilled jobs. The inherent conservatism within school cultures (see section 2.0) and scarce resources will ensure that the potential for creative virtual pedagogies will not develop rapidly. Exceptions to this will be schools close to relatively new university departments of education in which virtual pedagogic technologies will develop, led by the US and the Pacific Ring countries. Support from families in terms of paid outside school tuition, access to, and encouragement to be creative with, web based 2.00 technologies in the home will increase. However, this kind of ‘top-up’ support from families will be available to children with relatively high SES. Students with relative stable home environments will allow the second group to supplement school educational provision. There will be an increasing uptake in subjects related to new media and virtual technologies with students aspiring to jobs in creative industries. The third group will have a different experience of schooling.

Due to scarcity, declining roles and the shrinkage in the number of secondary schools, strong skills based vocational education will not develop in secondary schools and increasingly this third group will move between FE colleges and schools. These groups will spend less time in traditional school classrooms requiring increasing forms of surveillance, tracking and recording. New forms of assessment will be developed for the third group. There will be a growing group of students with low SES who will not receive top-up provision and who will become increasingly dependent on state education provision. However, schools will not invest in educational provision for groups with low SES due to the pressure to achieve good examination results. Schools will continue to focus extra support on students who they judge to be on the borderline between grades ‘D’ and ‘C’. Groups with low SES will continue to be those most excluded from school and they will continue to resist educational practices that they perceive to be ‘irrelevant’ to their lives and futures. Due to changes in family structures, this group will experience increasingly nomadic lifestyles exacerbated by spreading curriculum across sites. Coupled with the increase in use of technologies for pedagogic purposes this group will experience less human interaction in learning processes. Less social solidarity will be experienced in homes and in schools leading to increasing social alienation. This will exacerbate a rise in alliance to sub-cultures and outlaw groups as young people search to find a sense of belonging. They will not access web 2.0 technologies creatively and instead will become the ‘victims’ of increased use of ICT technology to deliver basic skills practice and to control and monitor movement. Industry and the private sector will take increasing control of education for traditional working class groups as schools fail to ‘engage’ them in learning. The rise of the role of the learning mentor will lead to increased surveillance on individual learning pathways. Many students will slip though the surveillance nets developed by schools and social services and will enter sub-cultures and unofficial local economies. If they live in areas of high unemployment, they will increasingly live outside official institutions, work places and community structures. Unlike the other two groups they will remain tied to their localities, travel less widely and become reliant on locally available resources.

This scenario depicts a widening of the gap between social groups, in which young people will increasingly lead parallel lives, with hugely different access to symbolic, human and educational resources. This will lead to a small elite upper class gaining access to the few professional jobs, majority middle groups entering a diverse range of jobs in new industries (regions in Bernstein’s typology) and an underclass that will have experienced a very different educational world to the other two groups. Ostensibly the (school) curriculum embraces the concerns of industrialists by foregrounding skills and competencies. Employers such as MacDonalds will take on the role of educating the third group. Therefore control over education of the traditional working class group will move away from schools and universities towards employers and the private sector.

Scenario 3 – A possible way forward?

A commitment to social justice drives this educational scenario. Scarcity of energy, clean water and non-contaminated food will drive this moral imperative. This scenario is unlikely to come about by 2020 but may come about by 2050. Fears about global environmental sustainability introduce a new moral imperative in schools making a break with traditional religious moralities and post-modern secular relativism. A recognition of locale-global connectivity and the interconnections between economic systems ushers in a realisation that national citizenry has given way to global citizenry. It will become apparent that a skills and competency based curricula cannot fulfil the educational aims of teaching citizens to deal with complex social and political problems. It will be recognised that competencies reflect neo-liberal philosophies that over-emphasise the individual and neglect the social and community contexts on which societies depends. Attempts to mine the inner potential of the person usually referred to as ‘gifts and talents’ ignore the socially embedded nature of learning. A few schools will adopt this philosophic approach before 2050 forging a new curriculum although these schools will remain in the minority and are more likely to be primary rather than secondary schools. Curricula will foreground thinking and will not address the concerns of industrialists but of environmentalism and global politics. Thematic and project work will blur disciplinary subject boundaries. The principles of philosophical enquiry and new forms of artistic creativity will underpin school activities. This process-based approach to learning will be reminiscent of previous child centred approaches to learning. Divisions between social groups will become less apparent, as learning will be based on bridging students’ local indigenous knowledge and culture with a curriculum based on ‘thinking’ principles. This type of curriculum will only become apparent in secondary schools if the principles that underlie its philosophy are adopted in the entry requirements of elite universities. Therefore a radical change to our understanding of teaching and learning will have to be led by HE. Schools will become well insulated from the immediate concerns of the market yet not from long term social needs. Creating the knowledge workers of the future can best be achieved by increasing, rather than decreasing the boundary between schools and work. Allowing schools to operate according to different principles to those of the economic marked allows them to do a fundamentally different job, that is, to teach thinking skills before applying them to the world. Students need time to develop critical thinking skills required to approach complex social, moral and political problems. Ironically this kind of curriculum would nurture the critical, creative and innovative thinking skills required for workers in the new knowledge economy. Returning to some of the educational ideals within the Greek curriculum might not be such a bad idea.

Footnotes

Note1 The typology of forms of knowledge was compiled with reference to Bernstein’s 1990 paper The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (see refs), from Bernstein’s chapter in the Greek curriculum, 1996 chapter 4 ‘Thoughts on the Trivium and Quadrivium: The Divorce of Knowledge from the Knower’ and from Tresilian, N. (2008) After Capitalism, Special Issue 21^st Society, Journal of the Academy of Social Science 3 (2) 201-211.

References

Apple, M. (2000) Can Critical Pedagogies interrupt Rightist Policies? Educational Theory, 50 (2), pp.229-254.

Arendt, H. (1998/58) The Human Condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Barnes, D. (1982) Practical Curriculum Study. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bernstein, B. (1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London and New York, Routledge.

Bernstein, B. (1996/2001) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. London, Taylor and Francis.

Bourne, J. (2000) New imaginings for reading for a new moral order: a review of production, transmission and acquisition of a new pedagogic culture in the UK. Linguistics and Education, 11 (1), pp.31-45.

Brawn, R. (2000) The formal and intuitive in science and medicine. In: Atkinson, T. and Claxton, G. (eds.) The Intuitive Practitioner. Buckingham, Open University McGraw Hill Education.

Brent, A. (1978) The Philosophical Foundations of the Curriculum. London, Allen and Unwin.

Brown, P. (1987) Schooling ordinary kids: inequality, unemployment and the new vocationalism. London, Tavistock.

Brown, P. and Lauder H. (eds.) (1992) Education for economic survival: from fordism to post-fordism? London, Routledge.

Brown, P. and Lauder, H. (2001) Capitalism and Social Progress; the future of society. London and New York, Palgrave.

Brown, P. and Hesketh, A. (2004) The Mismanagement of Talent: Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge Economy. Oxford, Oxford University Press

Brown, P., Green. and Lauder, H. (2001) High Skills: globalization, competitiveness, and skills formation. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Cassen, R. and Kingdom, G. (2007) Tackling low educational achievement. York, UK, Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Chaiklin, S and Lave, J (1996) Understanding Practice: Perspectives on activity in context. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Cole, M. (2003)

Davies, B. (2003) Shards of Glass: Children Reading and Writing beyond Gendered Identities. Cresskill, NJ., Hampton Press Inc.

DfES (2001) Youth Cohort Study: The Activities and Experiences of 17 Year Olds: England and Wales 2000. National Statistics, London. Available from www.dfes.gov.uk/statistics/BD/SFR

DfEE (2001) Opportunity and Skills in the Knowledge-driven Economy: a final statement on the work of the National Skills Task Force from the secretary of State for Education and Employment. Nottingham.

Dowling, P. (1998) The sociology of mathematics education: mathematical myths, pedagogic texts. London and Washington D.C., Falmer Press.

DTI (1998) Our Competitive Future: building the knowledge driven economy. London, HMSO.

DTI (2001) Opportunities for All in a World of Change. London, HMSO.

Duveen, G. (2001) Representations, Identities, Resistance. In: Deaux, K. and Philogene, G. (eds.) Representations of the Social. Oxford, MA., Blackwell, pp.257-270.

Felstead, A., Gallie, D. and Green, F. (2002) Work Skills in Britain 1986-2001. Nottingham, DfES.

Felstead, A., Gaille, D., Green, F. and Zhou, Y. (2007) Skills at Work. ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and organisational Performance. Universities of Oxford and Cardiff.

Goldthorpe, J. (2003) The myth of education-based meritocracy; why the theory isn’t working. New Economy, IPPR, pp.234-239.

Green, A. (1990) Education and state formation: the rise of education systems in England, France and USA. Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Green, A. and Steedman, H. (1997) Into the twenty first century: an assessment of British skills profiles and prospects. London, Centre for Economic Performance.

Green, A. and Ainley. P. (1995) Progression and the targets in post-16 education and training. London, University of London, Post-16 Education Centre.

Green, A. and Owen, D. (2003) Skill Shortages: Local perspectives from England. Regional Studies, 37 (2), pp.123-134.

Hargreaves, A. (2003) Teaching in the Knowledge Society: education in the age of insecurity. Berkshire, Open University Press McGraw Hill.

Harper, S. (2008) Diverse Populations. BCH Paper

Hedegaard, M. and Chaiklin, S. (2005) Radical-Local Teaching and Learning: A Cultural-Historical Approach. Aarhus, Aarhus University Press.

Hirst, P.H. (1974) Knowledge and the Curriculum. London, Routledge.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1968) Industry and Empire. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books

Hodkinson, P. (1998) Career decision making and the transition from school to work. In: Grenfell, M. and James, D. (eds) with Hodkinson, P., Reay, D. and Robbins, D. Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory. London, Falmer Press

Hodkinson, P. and Bloomer, M. (2000) Learning Careers: continuity and change in young people’s dispositions to learning. British Educational Research Journal, 26 (5), pp.583-597

Hogarth, T., Hasluck, C., Devins, D., Jacobs, C. and Johnson, S. (2003) Skill Shortages, Vacancies and Local Unemployment: a Synthesis of the Exploring Local Areas, Skills and Unemployment Analyses. Department for Education and Skills.

Illich, I.D. (1971) Deschooling Society. London, Calder and Boyars.

Ivinson, G. and Murphy, P. (2007) Rethinking single sex teaching. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Ivinson, G. and Murphy, P. (2003) Boys don’t write Romance: The construction of knowledge and social gender identities in English classrooms. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 11 (1), pp.89-111.

Jarman, T.L. (1963) Landmarks in the History of Education. London, John Murray.

Jones, L. and Moore, R. (1995) Appropriating competence: the competency movement, the New Right and the “culture change” project. British Journal of Sociology, 32, pp.259-65.

Keddie, N. (1971) Classroom knowledge. In: Young, M.F.D. (ed.) Knowledge and Control. London, Collier-Macmillan.

Keep, U. (2002) The English Vocational Education and Training Policy Debate – Fragile ‘Technologies’ or opening the ‘Black Box’: two competing visions of where we go next. Journal of Education and Work, 15 (4), pp.457-479.

Keep, U. (2005) ‘Too Good to be True? – Three Scenarios of the English VET system in 2015‘. SKOPE, University of Warwick

Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J. (1990) The culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding. In: Stigler, J., Shweder, R. and Herdt, G. (eds.) Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Lawton, D (1980) The Politics of the School Curriculum. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Leitch. S. (2006) Prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills. Norwich, HMSO.

Moore, R. and Hickox, M. (1995) Vocationalism and educational change. Curriculum Studies.

Murphy, P. and Whitelegg, E. (2006) Girls in the Physics Classroom: A Review of the Research into the Participation of Girls in Physics. London, Institute of Physics Publishing.

Nuffield (2006) Issue Paper 1, The New 14-19 Diplomas. The Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales.

Nuffield (2007) Issue Paper 2, 14-19 Partnerships: From Weakly Collaborative Arrangements to Strongly Collaborative Learning Systems. The Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales.

Nuffield (2008a) Issue Paper 3, Apprenticeship I Prospects for Growth. The Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales.

Nuffield (2008b) Issue Paper 4, Apprenticeship II A High-quality pathway for Young People? The Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales.

Ovitt, G. (1987) The restoration of perfection: labor and technology in medieval culture. New Brunswick and London, Rutgers University Press.

Pring, R. (1977) Knowledge and Schooling. Shepton Mallet, Somerset, Open Books

Purvis, J. (1991) A History of Women’s Education in England. Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

QCA (2000) Curriculum 2000

QCA (2003) Work-related learning for all at key stage 4. Guidance for implementing the statutory requirement from 2004. Available from www.qca.org.uk.

Robinson, M (2000) What is(n’t) in a subject called English? In: Davidson, J. and Moss, J. (eds.) Issues in English Teaching. London and New York, Routledge.

Roderick, G. and Stephens, M. (1978) Education and Industry in the Nineteenth Century. London

Sanderson, M. (1994) The Missing Stratum: Technical School Education in England, 1900-1990s. Athlone.

Schwartz Cowan, R. (1997) A Social History of American Technology. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Stanton, G. and Bailey, B. (2005) ‘In Search of VET’ Research Paper 62 December 2005. Warwick, SKOPE.

Steedman. H. and Green, A. (1996) Widening Participation in further education and training: a survey of the issues. London, London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance.

WAG (2002) Learning Country: Learning pathways 14-19 [Consultation Document.] Cardiff, Welsh Assembly Government (Welsh Assembly Government).

Wajcman, J. (1991) Feminism confronts technology. Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Walkerdine, V (1998) Counting Girls Out: Girls and Mathematics. London, Falmer Press, Taylor and Francis Group.

Walkerdine, V. (1990) School Girl Fictions. London, Verso.

Walkerdine, V. (1988) The Mastery of Reason, Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality. London, Routledge.

Walkerdine V., Lucey H. and Melody, J. (2001) Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Whitty, G., Rowe, G. and Aggleton, P. (1994a) Discourse in cross-curricular contexts: Limits to empowerment. International Studies in the Sociology of Education, 4 (1), pp.25-41.

Whitty, G., Rowe, G. and Aggleton, P. (1994b) Subjects and Themes in Secondary School Curriculum. Research Papers in Education, 9 (2), pp.159-181.

Willis P. (1977) Learning To Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough, Saxon House.

Willis P. (1984) Youth Unemployment: Thinking the Unthinkable. Youth and Policy, 2, pp.17-36

Willis, S. (1989) Real Girls Don’t Do Maths: Gender and the Construction of Privilege. Geelog, Deakin University Press.

Young, M.F.D. (1977) Curriculum Change: Limits and Possibilities. In: Young, M.F.D. and Whitty, G. (eds.) Society, State and Schooling. Surrey: Falmer Press

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

A key feature of early factories and offices was that they gave individual workers a spatial fix. The allocation of each person to a place and each place to a person was the foundation of regulation and control embedded in the physical construction of assembly lines and ‘personal offices’. ‘Placing’ workers made the security of materials and regulation of work flows much easier to achieve. More subtly, it made possible the introduction of disciplinary devices associated with panoptical surveillance, the normalizing gaze and the regimentation of time. The design of offices played an important role in the emergence of this regime of discipline, policing and control. A cube of space in the workplace (desk, bench or machine) became synonymous with a unit of labour on the payroll. ‘The industrial and engineering metaphors of so much organizational theory have been mirrored by the functionalist design dogma of Modernist, hard-edged, rectilinear offices’ (Turner, and Myerson, 1998, p20). Tayloristic management practices were applied in, indeed constituted by, Taylorized buildings (Baldry, 1999; Baldry et al, 1998). The term ‘office’, which had once meant a position or function, increasingly referred to a place. Furthermore, in the ‘personal office’, an individual worker became synonymous with a designated space. One consequence of industrialization was that the majority of workers became engaged in work activities outside the home. In the years before industrialization households were simultaneously places of social reproduction and production. Farms, workshops, manor houses and palaces were household economies. As a result, domestic and economic relationships were closely integrated; home and workplace were not separate spheres of social life. Farmers and rural labourers occupied the same buildings as agricultural machinery and livestock. Apprentices slept beside their benches in artisans’ workshops. Industrialization also raised the speed and flexibility of travel leading to the compression of time and space: that is, greater distances could be travelled in a given amount of time (Harvey, 1989). Despite frequent cries that urban travel speeds have reduced as road traffic has grown, the overall picture of the contemporary world is one in which time and space have become more compressed and journeys longer. Whereas in 1950 the average person in Britain travelled five miles per day, half a century later it was 28 miles and by 2025 it is forecast to double (Adams, 1999). At the same time, the pace of travel has quickened. Car speeds on trunk roads and motorways have increased, rail journey times have shrunk and jet aircraft transport people across the globe in a matter of hours. Modern travel, then, allows links to be made between places inaccessible in the recent past and in timeframes unimaginable even a few decades ago. Set against this backdrop, recent developments in information and communication technology (ICT) have led to a weakening of the spatial fixity of the workplace with workers increasingly detached from their personal cubes of space. This has made it possible for professional and managerial workers to share space and facilities in ‘collective offices’, allow more work to be done at home, and permit work to be carried around and completed wherever and whenever possible. This section, therefore, examines the statistical evidence on the spread of ICT in the workplace. It then goes on to outline recent historical evidence which shows the extent to which work is being detached from place. Figures for the spread of ICT are startling. The mobile phone, for example, has become a mass consumer product within the space of two decades. Worldwide, in 1990 there were 11 million mobile phone subscribers; by 2001 this had risen to 961 million, with 3,305 million by the end of 2007 (ITU, 2003 and 2007). In Britain, ownership of a mobile phone was relatively rare twenty years ago, but by 2001 official figures showed that 67% of adults owned one. The penetration level has continued to rise; in 2003 it stood at 75%, with 21% of adults using their mobile as their main method of telephony (ONS, 2004). Clearly, mobile phones are used for work as well as pleasure (Wacjman et al, 2008). Unfortunately, it is only relatively recently that surveys have asked specific questions about the use to which they are put. For example, a random survey of 2,466 workers in 2000 found that around half of all professionals and managers used a mobile phone in the course of their work (Taylor, 2002a: Table 7). Data series which chart the use of ICT for work purposes more generally, however, have a longer genealogy. They strongly suggest that there has been a rapid increase in the use of computers at work. In 1986, two-fifths (40.3%) of employees reported that they used computerized equipment in the course of their daily activities. By 1992 the proportion had risen to over half (56.0%) and by 2006 it was more than three-quarters (77.4%). Furthermore, by 2006 it was very rare for nonmanual workers to report that they did not use computers at all in their work. Indeed, their use was regarded as ‘essential’ to the conduct of non-manual work activities by around two-thirds of those surveyed (Felstead et al, 2007, pp95-99, Tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.5). As with the fixed line telephone, the computer has also become mobile with the invention of the laptop. These developments have opened up the possibility that office workers can do their jobs in a much wider variety of locations and times. There is no technical necessity for most non-manual workers to be in a particular building, office or desk for most of the time. This is not to suggest that we are entering the era of the paperless office or the virtual meeting; there are circumstances where presence in a designated place is desirable and/or required. However, the number of such instances is drastically reduced by the mobile phone and the laptop (Worthington, 1997; Zelinsky, 1997). Unfortunately, surveys that carry questions on where people work are few and far between. Moreover, data collection processes lack subtlety and may not always detect the fine grain changes to people’s working lives that the mobile phone and laptop bring. However, in what follows we try to piece together currently available data. One source of evidence is the Change in Employer Practices Survey (CEPS) (White et al, 2004). This survey was carried out between July-September 2002 and comprised telephone interviews with 2,000 senior human resource/industrial relations managers in a nationally representative stratified random sample of workplaces in Britain. The CEPS covered all sectors of the economy and was constructed to collect evidence from both large and small establishments provided they employed at least five workers. Around two-thirds of managers approached took part in the survey with interviews lasting around 30 minutes (Taylor, 2002b). The survey was designed to assess recent changes in employer practices and indicate expected changes in the near future. Respondents were accordingly asked to report on ‘change over the last three years’ and plans for change ‘over the next 12 months’. The topics covered included numbers and types of employees, promotion and recruitment, staff working conditions, employee involvement, the use of information technology, the legal and regulatory environment, and last but not least, the management of space at work. With respect to the latter, respondents were asked: ‘Over the last three years have any of the following things happened at your establishment?’ Options included: ‘Increased use of open plan offices’ and ‘The use of hot desking’. They were also asked: ‘Are you planning to introduce/extend use of [each practice] during the next 12 months?’ In this survey, around one in six establishments reported an increase over three years in the use of open plan offices (17.4%) and hot desking (15.6%) (hot desking was defined in the survey as the situation where ’staff have no fixed personal workspace and use any available desk as needed’). A smaller number of managers said they intended to extend or introduce such changes in the next twelve months. These proportions are sizeable and are indicative of substantial changes to the physical layout of offices and factories (cf. Vallentine, 2008 on changes to the layout of formal educational settings). In reviewing this evidence one commentator was moved to concede that ‘we are going through a radical transformation in the physical shape of offices and plants’ (Taylor, 2002b, p12). Furthermore, the authors of the survey conclude that ‘not only have recent changes in workspace been substantial, but it is relatively easy to predict that they will continue’ (White et al, 2004, p82). CEPS was an establishment-level survey. The Location of Work Survey (LWS) was conducted at an organizational level. The LWS polled the views of 128 senior facilities/property managers in large organizations in the first six months of 2002 (see Felstead et al, 2003b, 2005b). The information gathered provides a high level organizational view across many establishments of past, current and future changes to the physical layout of workplaces and offices in particular. This does mean that organizations are more likely to report change occurring in at least one establishment under their ownership, even though this change may only affect a small proportion of the total workforce. LWS respondents were asked at the beginning of the interview to think ‘about the staff that work for your organization in the UK’ and to answer a series of questions. These included whether they had introduced a number of new ways of reconfiguring office space, the extent to which these internal changes to the layout of their offices had occurred over the last five years, and whether they had plans to roll-out these changes throughout the organization’s offices. The results suggest that many large organizations have already experimented with some reshaping of their office real estates. The penetration of collective office arrangements was high and almost half of large employers expected to institute these changes in other offices under their control in the near future. For example, ‘hot desks’ (that is, ‘desks which workers have to book in advance to use’) were present in three out of ten (31.3%) large organizations, rising to almost two out of five (39.6%) large private sector employers. However, the extent of their use was quite modest – in almost all cases less than 5% of office staff were actually reported to be hot desking. Nevertheless, a sizeable proportion (30.0%) of hot desking employers had a formal policy or guidelines on the use of bookable desk space which, in many cases, they were willing to share with the research team. Furthermore, backwards and forwards-looking questions suggest that hot desking has recently become of interest to large employers. A quarter (27.8%) reported increased use over the last five years; nearly half (44.6%) planned to make greater use of hot desking in the near future. A similar, if slightly more pronounced, picture emerges with regard to the use of ‘touchdown desks’ (that is, ‘desks that are set aside for drop in use by anyone in the organization’). According to the LWS this arrangement was used to some extent, albeit in only a limited way, in two-fifths (43.3%) of large organizations. Many expected to roll-out their use even further in the next few years. Overarching redesign of office space was also being considered by almost two-thirds (64.6%) of the organizations surveyed. Almost half of these organizations (47.2%) had formal plans in place at the time of the interview. Respondents explained in some detail what these redesigns entailed. They ranged from equipping particular areas such as restaurants, cafés and breakfast bars with internet access and laptop plug-in points, through to wholesale reviews of space usage and identification of ways in which space per office worker could be reduced. Respondents who reported that the organization had changed the location of work in the last five years or planned to do so in the future, were asked to indicate the main drivers behind these decisions. Two factors were prominent: the need to economize on property costs, and the desire to promote greater work flexibility and social interaction. The latter was cited by over half of respondents whose organizations had increased or planned to increase use of touchdown desks. This reflects other research findings that suggest the further apart people sit and the greater the physical barriers between them, the less likely they are to interact. In personal office environments workers are four times more likely to talk to someone sitting six feet away than they are with someone sitting 60 feet away; any further away and they are unlikely to interact at all. Similarly, personal offices reduce the chance of chance meetings taking place – research suggests that two people working on different floors in the same building where individuals are allocated their own desk space have only a 1% chance of meeting in the course of a day (Nathan and Doyle, 2002). The need to save on property costs was also a strong factor driving the introduction of collective office arrangements, particularly among respondents who reported recent increases or planned extensions to their hot desking programmes. Almost a half of these respondents cited property costs as one of the main drivers behind such programmes. Fortunately, we are blessed with more historical individual-level data on the extent to which work is carried out at or from home. The key one is the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Each LFS contains data on a random sample of individuals throughout the UK. Almost 60,000 households are contacted and information is collected on a total of 150,000 people, of whom around 65,000 are aged 16 and above and are in work at the time of interview. The LFS series benefits from the regularity with which the relevant data are collected. In 1981, the LFS carried its first question on the location of work. Respondents were asked ‘do you work mainly’ in one of four locations: in your own home, in the same building or grounds as your home, in different places using home as a base, or somewhere quite different from home. Despite offering a unique perspective on the location of work, and providing a sift survey for a study of ‘home-based’ workers (Hakim, 1987), eleven years were to pass before the question was repeated. It reappeared in 1992 and has been asked quarterly in every LFS since. Further questions were added to the Spring 1997 quarter, which identified those who worked at least one full day at home in the week before interview. Respondents were also asked whether the use of a computer and telephone was necessary for them to work in this way (see Felstead et al, 2000: Table A1). Each LFS provides a snapshot picture of the state of the labour market. Stacking the results from each LFS alongside others in the series provides an insight into changes over time. Given the frequency with which questions on the location of work are asked, the analysis for this paper is based on 18 surveys – the 1981 LFS and Spring quarters for the years 1992-2008. However, some of the analysis reported here is restricted to shorter time periods given data availability. For example, the partial use as a workspace and the importance of ICT data were only collected from 1997 onwards. According this evidence, then, where do people mainly work? The short answer is that around nine out of ten people – for most of the time at least – carry out their work somewhere separate from where they live. These locations include a shop, office or factory. However, the proportion doing so has declined over time. Those working mainly at home now accounts for one in forty workers (2.8% in 2008), rising from 1.5% in 1981, although it has changed little over the last decade and a half (see Figure 1 and Table 1). On the other hand, the proportion of workers mainly using their home as a base of work has increased every year until 2006 when it peaked at 8.6%. Nevertheless, in 2008 8.2% of workers (or one in twelve) carried out their work in a variety of places using their home as a base, up from 2.8% in 1981. Taking these two pieces of evidence together, we find that in 1981, 4.3% of employed people in the UK carried out their activities mainly at or from their own home. Over a quarter of a century later, this proportion had risen to 11.0%, representing 3.2 million workers who worked outside a conventional workplace, triple the number recorded in 1981. Since 1997 the LFS has added additional questions which make it possible to track the extent to which work is being carried out at home for at least one full day a week. This question is asked in order to identify those people who work at home occasionally rather than permanently. For example, a respondent who spends four days a week working in an office, but spends one day a week working at home would be captured by this question. However, working at home for periods of less than a full day would not be captured nor would several hours over the space of a number of days even if over the course of a week they amounted to a full day’s work. As a result, the data captured by this question produce conservative estimates. Nevertheless, these data along with data on those who work mainly at and those who work from home suggests that around one in seven (14.8%) workers in the UK use their home to some extent as their place of work each week. This equates to around 4.3 million people in 2008 (see Table 2 and Figure 2). The analysis can be taken a step further by examining the trends in those who report that it would be impossible to work ‘off-site’ without the use of a telephone and a computer. When these results are examined, it is interesting to note the growing reliance and importance of these kinds of devices to this way of working. Whereas in 1997 a third (33.0%) of those working at or from home for least one day a week reported the centrality of information and communication technology (ICT) in allowing them to do so, by 2005 the proportion had exceeded a half and by 2008 it was nearer three-fifths (55.4%). This provides some empirical evidence for the ability of technology, via the ‘electronic envelope’, to stretch the reach of the conventional workplace well beyond its physical boundaries (Felstead et al, 2005a). This table is based on the spring Labour Force Survey for each of the years which carried the work location question. For each year, the data have been weighted by the appropriate variable to compensate for differential response rates to the survey. Only those aged 16 or over and in paid employment have been selected and the percentages are based on those who gave valid responses to the question. The table presents data for the UK. Source: own calculations from the spring Labour Force Survey for the years 1981 and 1992-2008. # From this evidence, it is clear that changes are taking place in the location of work and that ICT is increasingly being used to bridge the physical gap between those working at home and the conventional workplace. However, the data we have relates to working at or from home and does not allow us to assess the extent to which the conventional workplace is itself being used differently – possibly as a base from which to visit clients or as a drop-in centre – or the full extent to which people are working on the move. This kind of data is not collected by the LFS. Instead, we have to rely on other sources of information – such as the employer data reported above – in order to gain insights into these issues. One individual-level exception is the Skills Survey series (see Felstead et al, 2007). In 2001 and 2006, a couple of work location questions were added. These were designed to capture the main and occasional work locations of individuals – such as those discussed above – along with a number of additional response options. These included working in a variety of places (using either home or the office as a base) and working on the move. Neither of these options is fully captured by the LFS questions discussed so far. The results corroborate the conclusion that the conventional workplace is not the one and only place of work for a sizeable minority of those who work in the UK. Around two out of five workers (37.8%) reported working in locations outside of the conventional office, factory or shop in the week before interview. Moreover, in the space of five years this proportion had risen by a couple of percentage points. While recognizing that a gradual shift has taken place in the location of work for many workers, one objection is that it has had the greatest impact on those with a long tradition of working outside the conventional physical boundaries of an office, factory or shop. The implication is that if the trends presented so far can be attributed to more of the self-employed working in this way, then there is little evidence that conventional workplaces are losing their centrality as places of work for employees. It is true that a sizeable proportion of the people using their home as a place of work belong to categories of employment, occupations and jobs that have a long history of working in this way. Nevertheless, the majority of newcomers come from groups with far weaker traditions of this style of working. Between 1997 and 2002, for example, two-thirds of the rise in the number of people working for at least one day a week at or from home were employees – representing an additional half a million employees as opposed to an additional quarter of a million self-employed (Felstead et al, 2005b). Similarly, non-manual workers have been heavier contributors than their manual peers to the rise in the absolute number of people who use their home as a place of work. Depending on the measure used, it is estimated that between two-fifths and two-thirds of the 1997-2000 increase, for example, came from the managerial, professional and technical groups. Moreover, the proportionate changes are even more dramatic since the largest absolute increases in the number of people involved are among employment types, occupations and jobs that do not have long a pedigree of carrying out work away from the conventional workplace. Only one in thirteen employees, for example, regularly work at or from home, yet the number doing so has risen by almost a half over the 1997-2002 period. The number using ICT to do so has doubled over the same period (Felstead et al., 2003b: Table 3).

What does the future look like?

In the past forecasters and futurologists have produced estimates of the numbers of people working at home which have failed to materialize. For example, back in 1999 and looking forward to 2010, it was estimated that ‘40 to 50% of the work activities of many managerial and professional activities (sic) are likely to be undertaken at home’ (Scase, 1999, p28). According to some estimates around 32% would be doing so by 2006 (estimates reported by Lees, 1999, p14). Taking even the widest of interpretation of home-located working reported earlier in this review, it is difficult to reconcile these predictions with current estimates which put the use of the home as a place of work for at least one day a week at 14.8% for all workers rising to around a fifth for professionals (cf. Felstead et al, 2003b, Table 5). Nevertheless, predictions that the ‘growing capabilities of communication technologies are likely to shift the emphasis towards the home’ and that ‘individuals will become more mobile in all spheres of life including work and employment (Scase, 1999, p28, p5) have been confirmed by evidence that has subsequently emerged, some of which has been reviewed above. More recent predictions of the future, then, have been influenced by the proposition that the spatial fluidity of work will increase: ‘for a substantial proportion of workers, work in 20 years time will be more about movement than staying put’ (Moynagh and Worsley, 2005, p101; Urry, 2000, chapter three). However, at present, many of the data sources on which this review draws remain steeped in a tradition that sees a clear divide between home and work. We can, therefore, only catch a glimpse of these particular changes. Nevertheless, the steady rise in the use of the home as a place of work and as a place from which to work is a notable development that has affected managerial, professional and technical workers in particular. These are the very occupational groups that are predicted to grow in number in the period up until 2014 (Wilson et al, 2006, pp67-72; Wilson, 2008). It is likely, therefore, that the trends presented so far in this review can be extended forwards to 2025. If we assume that historic data trends will continue into the future, the proportion using their home as a place of work for one day a week will rise to around a fifth by 2025. It may turn out to be even higher given that up to one in five managerial, professional and technical workers tend to work in this way and the occupations predicted to decline most are those which are least likely to use off-site working. However, based on historic data trends stretching back to 1992, the proportion using their home as the place of work is likely to rise by fraction of a percentage point (see Figure 3). These predictions are in line with others who have also ventured to speculate 20 years into the future (eg Moynagh and Worsley, 2005, pp101-106). Nevertheless, such predictions are highly sensitive to the period selected as the basis for extrapolating the future (see Table 3). For example, were we to take the 2003-2008 period as the basis for predicting the proportion of workers using their home for at least one day a week, then the predicted rise would be a couple of percentage points smaller than shown in Figure 3. This is because the rises over the last five years have been smaller than they have in the past. Even so, this prediction would still mean that by 2025 almost a fifth of workers would be using their home in some way as a place of work for one day a week or even longer. On the other hand, the prevalence of working mainly home has fluctuated up and down by a fraction of a percentage point since data collection restarted after an absence of eleven years. As a result, it began and ended the period 1992-2008 at more or less the same point (2.7% in 1992 and 2.8% in 2008). Based on this evidence, only a very small change in the numbers working mainly at home can be expected as we move towards 2025. However, predictions based on the longer time series (stretching back to 1981) suggest that the rise may be much greater. Similarly, using the last five years as the basis for future trends it is estimated that 4.2% of people will be working mainly at home by 2025. Having said this, the expectation is for a continuation of the muted growth experienced since the early 1990s (cf. Figure 3). This is because those who do most of their work at home is a narrow categorization which excludes the use of intermediate spaces which cannot be classified either as the home or the office, working on the move or working in a variety of places within the workplace by, for example, hot desking. Nevertheless, the ICT devices – mobile phones in particular – provide a ‘digital umbilical cord’, connecting those who work detached from a particular place of work to wider networks of relationships (Townsend, 2001, p70). It is these uses of space which have the greatest consequences and challenges for learning at work.

What are the consequences for learning at work?

Despite our somewhat patchy evidence base on the location of work, it is clear that the future of work will be spatially diverse. Greater connectivity will mean that workers will be able to maintain a virtual presence wherever they happen to be – on the train, in the car, a motorway service station or at home in the garden. This is what Gergen (2002) refers to as balancing ‘absent presence’ in one world, while being ‘tele-present’ in another. What consequences might this have for how and what learning goes on? This the question to which we now turn. Increasingly, learning is conceptualized as comprising much more than simply counting the number of times someone goes on a training course, for how long and at what cost. Most notably, this is encapsulated in the term ‘learning as participation’ as distinct from ‘learning as acquisition’ (Sfard, 1998). The former refers to a conceptualization which views learning as a process in which learners improve their work performance by carrying out daily work activities via interacting with people, tools and materials. The latter perspective, on the other hand, views learning as a product with a visible, identifiable outcome, often accompanied by certification or proof of attendance. Nevertheless, empirical measurement still tends to concentrate on collecting data on ‘learning as acquisition’ with counts focused on qualification attainment, years spent in formal education, and the incidence and length of off-the-job training (see Felstead, 2008). The detachment of work from place has consequences for how and what the workers involved have to learn to survive and prosper in such a world. Increased geographical dispersion of workers from one another, for example, makes the induction of newcomers into a community of practitioners more difficult, but not impossible, to achieve (see Jewson, 2008. for a fuller discussion). Physical proximity with co-workers facilitates serendipitous contacts and promotes non-verbal communication through body language, eye contact and touching rituals such as the handshake. However, this problem can be overcome, at least in part, by the scheduling of face-to-face interactions between colleagues, clients and superiors. Some organizations with ‘location independent working’ schemes have taken this a stage further by requiring employees to spend time on-site prior to being formally based off-site (Felstead et al, 2003a). However, difficulties remain. First, the impact and relevance of attitudes and information transmitted in the early stages of employment gradually diminishes over time. Initial on-site induction offers a fixed reference point that can become dated. Second, for on-site induction to be effective, a substantial proportion of the workforce – old timers needed to induct newcomers – also have to be physically present. Third, a requirement that new staff report on-site for several months at the start of their employment may not helpful in wooing potential recruits attracted by the prospect of working without having to be physically present on a daily basis at a particular site. Without these constraints workers may be able to avoid relocating their families and households, thereby maintaining an acceptable work-life balance. Elsewhere (Felstead et al, 2005a; Jewson, 2008) we have identified three ideal types of spatial working arrangements: working in ‘collective offices’; working at home; and working on the move. Like all places of work, each has its own set of ‘learning affordances’; that is, ‘opportunities for individuals to participate in activities and interactions’ (Billett, 2004, p109). In each the physical distances from colleagues and clients together with the physical closeness to others such as family, friends and even strangers poses particular difficulties. We take each ideal type in turn. Working in ‘collective offices’ requires that workers have to find a work station, whether it be hot desk, hot room, touchdown desk, seat in the atrium, couch in the lobby, or table in the coffee bar. By contrast workers in ‘personal offices’ have their own desk where their activities and interactions with others can be monitored and observed. The shift to ‘collective offices’, then, prioritizes ‘change over stability, process over structure, mobility over stasis, and uncertainty over predictability’ (Felstead et al., 2005a: 80). This means that workers from across the organization from different levels and from different departments are constantly bumping into one another as they move through the building seeking a place to work. The affordances of these workplaces are that informal and unplanned encounters between different types of workers become an institutionalized part of this place seeking behaviour. Individuals who succeed in such an environment develop the capacity to plan their work schedules, match their work tasks to appropriate places and anticipate their future spatial requirements. Working at home, on the other hand, requires that workers learn how manage the twin pressures of isolation from co-workers and the need to fend off interruptions from family and friends who are brought into close proximity when work is brought home. Those who succeed in managing these pressures deploy particular practices that are self-imposed. These include marking spatial and temporal boundaries around workstations, using personal cues to switch between domestic and employment activities, defending working space and time from the invasion of other household members, and developing the ability to alter the plans of other household members in the light of their work commitments (see Felstead and Jewson, 2000, pp120-160). A different set of practices is associated with working on the move. This involves the simultaneous occupation of transitional spaces that are shared with strangers and the completion of work tasks. These spaces include the means of transportation such as planes, cars, trains and stop-over points while en route such as hotels, service stations and departure lounges. Each has particular affordances that facilitates or hinders the execution of particular work tasks. Getting to know what can be done where is a crucial skill that needs to be acquired. For example, securing temporary access to a space that is wired to the electronic envelope is not always easy. Locations with good connections are increasingly provided in public places, such as railway stations, waiting rooms and intercity carriages. However, access is often limited, noisy and crowded. Moreover, connections while in transit may be frail and subject to disruption. Furthermore, once acquired, space itself needs to be defended from unwanted incursions from others travelling in the same shared space such as the train carriage or aircraft cabin. Social distance, too, has to be maintained and protected from intrusion. Books, newspapers, documents, laptops and mobile phones are often used to signal when interaction is not welcome. Working in each of these unconventional workplaces calls for a distinctive repertoire of skills and practices that has to be acquired (Jewson, 2008). Increasing heterogeneity in the spatial and temporal contours of the future of work makes these challenges more pronounced since workers also have to learn how to switch between sharply contrasting work locations with different affordances to paid work.

Conclusion

Discussion of the changing place of work tends to excite hyperbole, exaggerated claims and wild predictions. This type of reporting – often emphasized by attention-grabbing newspaper headlines – over-emphasizes the rapidity of change. However, the evidence reviewed here suggests that changes in the location of work are more gradual with work becoming increasingly, but slowly, detached from conventional places of work. This change is affecting office workers in particular who historically have been given individual and personalized cubes of space marked by a walled cell or by an allocated desk. Instead, office work can now, with the help of ICT and the mobile phone and laptop in particular, be carried out in a variety of different places – in the home, in an assortment of locations within the office and in ‘third places’ such as the train, the car and the plane. Faced with rising real estate costs, employers are reconsidering the value of ‘personal office’ space which is often left vacant while individuals are away from their desks. As a result, employers are increasingly turning to use of ‘collective office’ space in which facilities are shared and used on an as needed basis. This development is typified by ‘hot desking’ which has grown in the past and is expected to grow in the future. Evidence of change also comes from individual-level surveys of where people work. This shows that in 2008 around one in seven (14.8%) workers used their home, for at least one day a week, as a place of work or as the start point from which to work outside the conventional workplace. Back in 1997, when data on this issue was first collected in the UK, the proportion stood at 11.3%. Based on this trend, the proportion will have risen to around 20% of workers by 2025. Effective functioning in such multiple places of work requires heightened levels of self-discipline and the ability to make places amenable to work as well as doing particular work tasks in appropriate places. Both of these abilities require workers to learn about the affordances of particular places in order to understand what works where and how, and therefore cope with being ‘always on, always ready, always connected’ wherever they happen to be.

Acknowledgements

Material from the Labour Force Surveys is Crown Copyright and has been made available by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) through The Data Archive and has been used by permission. Neither the ONS nor The Data Archive bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data reported here. Special thanks go to Birgit Austin at The Data Archive who facilitated swift access to the LFS data for 2008. The review develops, adds and updates some previously published research carried out by the author along with colleagues, Nick Jewson and Sally Walters.

References

Adams, J. (1999) The social implications of hypermobility. In: OECD (ed) The Economic and Social Implications of Sustainable Transportation. ENV/EPOC/PP/T(99)3/FINAL/REV1. Baldry, C. (1999) Space – the final frontier. Sociology, 33 (3), pp.535-53. Baldry, C., Bain, P. and Taylor, P. (1998) Bright Satanic offices: intensification, control and team Taylorism. In: Thompson, P. and Warhurst, C. (eds) Workplaces of the Future. London, Macmillan Business. Billett, S. (2004) Learning through work: workplace participatory practices. In: Rainbird, H., Fuller, A. and Munro, A. (eds) Workplace Learning in Context. London, Routledge. Bridges, W. (1995) Jobshift: How to Prosper in a World Without Jobs. London, Nicholas Brealey. Felstead, A. (1996) Homeworking in Britain: the national picture in the mid-1990s. Industrial Relations Journal, 27 (3), pp.225-238. Felstead, A. (2008) Workplace learning and training: knowledge-rich or knowledge poor? Mapping a research agenda. In: Hogarth, T. (ed) Skills in England 2008. Coventry, Learning and Skills Council, forthcoming. Felstead, A. and Jewson, N. (2000) In Work, At Home: Towards an Understanding of Homeworking, London, Routledge. Felstead, A., Gallie, D., Green, F. and Zhou, Y. (2007) Skills at Work in Britain, 1986 to 2006. Oxford, ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance. Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2003b) The changing place of work. ESRC Future of Work Programme, Working Paper No 28, June. Leeds: University of Leeds. Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2005a) Changing Places of Work. London, Palgrave. Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2005b) The shifting locations of work: new statistical evidence on the spaces and places of employment. Work, Employment and Society, 19 (2), pp.415-431. Felstead, A., Jewson, N., and Walters, S. (2003a) Managerial control of employees working at home. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 41 (2), pp.241-262. Felstead, A., Jewson, N., Phizacklea, A. and Walters, S. (2000) A statistical portrait of working at home in the UK: evidence from the Labour Force Survey. ESRC Future of Work Programme, Working Paper No 4, March. Leeds: University of Leeds. Felstead, A., Jewson, N., Phizacklea, A. and Walters, S. (2001) Working at home: statistical evidence for seven key hypotheses. Work, Employment and Society, 15 (2), pp.215-231. Gergen, K.J. (2002) The challenge of absent presence. In: Katz, J.E. and Aakhus, M.17 (eds) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communications, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Haddon, L. and Brynin, M. (2005) The character of telework and the characteristics of teleworkers. New Technology, Work and Employment, 20 (1), pp.34-46. Hakim, C. (1987) Home-based work in Britain: a report on the 1981 National Homeworking Survey and the DE research programme on homework. Department of Employment Research Papers, No. 60. London, Department of Employment. Hakim, C. (1998) Social Change and Innovation in the Labour Market: Evidence from the Census SARs on Occupational Segregation and Labour Mobility, Part-Time Work and Student Jobs, Homework and Self-Employment. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Halford, S. (2005) Hybrid workspace: re-spatialisations of work, organisation and employment. New Technology, Work and Employment, 20 (1), pp.19-33. Harrison, A. (2008) Changing spaces, changing places. Beyond Current Horizons Review Paper. Available from http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_spaces_places_andrew_harrison.pdf, Accessed 11 September 2008. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Post Modernity. Oxford, Blackwell. Hotopp, U. (2002) Teleworking in the UK. Labour Market Trends, 110 (6), pp.311-318. Huws, U., Jagger, N. and O’Regan, S. (1999) Teleworking and globalisation. Institute for Employment Studies Report No 358. Brighton, Institute for Employment Studies. ITU (2003) Key global telecom indicators for the world telecommunication service sector. Available from http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/KeyTelecom99.html Accessed 20 March 2003. ITU (2007) Key global telecom indicators for the world telecommunication service sector. Available from http://www.itu.net/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/KeyTelecom99.html Accessed 12 September 2008. Jewson, N. (2007) Communities of practice in their place: some implications of changes in the spatial location of work. In: Hughes, J., Jewson, N. and Unwin, L. (eds) Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives. London, Routledge. Lees, C. (1999) The age of the homeworker? In: Myerson, J. (ed) Work at Home: The Proceedings of the Thinktank on Home-working at the Royal College of Art. London, Royal College of Art. Mitel (1999) Virtually There – Evolution of Call Centres: A Study into Virtual Call Centres and the Opportunities and Challenges for Teleworkers and Employers, Mitel, Momouthshire. Moynagh, M. and Worsely, R. (2005) Working in the Twenty-First Century. King’s Lynn, The Tomorrow Project. Nathan, M. and Doyle, J. (2002) The State of the Office: The Politics and Geography of Working Space. London, The Industrial Society. Office for National Statistics (2004) Social Trends 34. London, The Stationery Office. Scase, R. (1999) Britain Towards 2010: The Changing Business Environment. Swindon, Economic and Social Research Council. Sfard, A. (1998) On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27 (2), pp.4-13. Taylor, P. (2008) Pack a punch while on the move. Financial Times, 23 September. Taylor, R. (2002a) Britain’s World of Work – Myths and Realities. Swindon, Economic and Social Research Council. Taylor, R. (2002b) Managing Workplace Change. Swindon, Economic and Social Research Council. Townsend, A.M. (2001) Mobile communications in the twenty-first century city. In: 18 Brown, B., Green, N. and Harper, R. (eds) Wireless World: Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age, London, Springer-Verlag. Turner, G. and Myerson, J. (1998) New Workspace, New Culture. London, Design Council / Gower. Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London, Routledge. Valentine, G. (2008) Changing spaces, changing places? Beyond Current Horizons Review Paper. Available from http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_spaces_places_gill_valentine.pdf. Accessed 11 September 2008. Wajcman, J., Bittman, M. and Brown, J.E. (2008) Families without borders: mobile phones, connectedness and work-home divisions. Sociology, 42 (4), pp.635-652. White, M., Hill, S., Mills, C. and Smeaton, D. (2004) Managing to Change? British Workplaces and the Future of Work. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, R.A. (2008) The future of work: what does work mean 2025 and beyond? Beyond Current Horizons Review Paper. Available from http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_work_wilson.pdf Accessed 15 September 2008. Wilson, R., Homenidou, K. and Dickerson, A. (2006) Working Futures 2004-2014: National Report. Wath-on-Dearne, Sector Skills Development Agency. Worthington, J. (1997) Reinventing the Workplace. Boston, Architectural Press. Zelinsky, M. (1997) New Workplaces for New Workstyles. New York, McGraw-Hill.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Getting to know Web 2.0

The technological innovations that have enabled what we call Web 2.0, or the Read/Write Web, are perhaps best understood in the context of the costs of contribution to the earlier incarnations of the World Wide Web. In the early days of the web, which we can call Web 1.0, posting information online was expensive, time-consuming, and required specialized knowledge. One had to register a domain name, hire a hosting server, learn HTML, and use FTP tools to upload files to a Web server in order to put a page on the World Wide Web. These barriers were not overwhelming, hobbyists could learn the skills and commit the resources to participate, but as a result of these barriers, only a tiny portion of the community which used the web was responsible for providing the content. Most people just went to read, and then later, as bandwidth grew, to listen and watch.

Over time, web developers increasingly added functionality to websites that allowed people to more easily contribute content to the web. Some of the earliest of these sites were discussion boards, a feature of the internet from even the days before the web, which allowed multiple users to easily contribute information to the web without needing to learn how to program in HTML or register a domain. These simple discussion spaces embodied the crucial design principle that has driven the development of Web 2.0: make it as simple, as time-cheap, and inexpensive as possible for ordinary Web users to contribute. We’ll soon turn to how this principle has found expression in a diverse variety of platforms – blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, virtual worlds – but first it’s worth teasing out the significance of designing for simplified contributions.

Lowering the costs of communicating and barriers to participation

To sum up the Web 2.0 phenomena in a sentence: lower communication costs have led to opportunities for more inclusive, collaborative, democratic online participation. Economists would say that when developers made it easier to contribute to the web, they were lowering the interaction costs of communication. As the costs of communicating online decreased, more people, millions more, decided that it was worth their while to participate in these communication networks. These people did not just communicate more, they started communicating in qualitatively different ways than before. As these millions found new media for expression and collaboration, they opened possibilities for a more inclusive, open, democratic society, possibilities which may or may not be realized. Understanding these social possibilities requires better understanding the technical design principle that has enabled them.

The dramatically lower costs of communicating information over the web can be illustrated with a simple thought experiment: how would you share a video with all of your friends in 1980 and today? In 1980, sharing a video message with your friends would involve the following steps: filming on a tape, transferring the tape to VHS, copying each individual VHS tape, packaging and addressing each tape, and mailing the tape to everyone you know. The time costs of such a venture were basically prohibitively high. People certainly had an interest in seeing each other’s video clips – recall the remarkable run of Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Home Videos – but they were simply too expensive to share within individual social networks.

Now consider the costs of adding video to YouTube. Click: I start my Web Cam, and I spout wisdom. Click: I save it. Click: I open YouTube. Click: I upload the file. Click: I label it with a “tag” so that others can find it (tagging is discussed further below). And for bonus points, Click: I change my Facebook status update to alert everyone in my social network that I’ve just added a video. There is some degree of learning curve to figure out how all of these applications and services work. But as people learn their way around one Web 2.0 service, they realize that Web 2.0 tools share many common features and it is increasingly easy to learn the next. Compared to the economic costs of these kinds of interactions in the past, global communication today is almost impossibly free.

Lowering communication costs doesn’t just lead to more communication, it leads to qualitatively different behavior by web users. For instance, it turns out that if you make it extremely time-cheap to contribute an article to an online encyclopedia, that people will create a Wikipedia with 2.5 million of them. It also turns out that if you make the editorial process decentralized and consensual, that people will anonymously and collaboratively edit those same 2.5 million articles and come to editorial loggerheads over only a tiny percentage of them. It turns out that if you make it time-cheap to post short updates about your day and read at a glance all of the updates of your friends and colleagues, that millions will start following the daily and hourly turns of people’s lives through tools like Facebook and Twitter (both to be discussed further). By itself, little updates like “Struggling with my statistics assignment,” are rather dull and prosaic. But aggregated into thousands of little updates, friends are tracking each other’s lives through Web 2.0 tools much more closely than has ever been possible by all but the closest social and working relationships. As a final example, the ease of producing and sharing online videos has allowed for the new social phenomena of viral videos, publically available online videos which are seen by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, which are typically created, published, and distributed outside of the traditional studio/publisher information networks. Because cheaper communication allows new communication media and practices, we have a whole new set of shared cultural texts created and distributed outside of the traditional, hierarchical publication networks.

Lowering the interaction costs of communication leads to perhaps the most important feature of Web 2.0: its inclusive, collaborative capacity. The new Read/Write web is allowing people to work together, share information, and reach new and potentially enormous audiences outside some of the traditional structures of power, authority, and communication in our society. The social developments that have resulted from the Web 2.0 phenomena are best understood through a lens of democratization, but we must keep in mind the caveat that democracy means many different things in many different places (Haste and Hogan, 2006). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for the wealthy in the West with instant access to the web through wireless-connected laptop computers, and another thing for the poor in the West who access the web through public connections in schools and libraries (Jenkins, 2007). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for students in rural Africa with dial-up modem connections on cast off computers from Europe, and another thing for bloggers in China whose content is scrutinized by an army of government censors and language police. While democratization may mean different things in these diverse areas, certain commonalities hold as well. More people are getting involved in a series of increasingly global conversations, more people have the capacity to share their thoughts and insights to the world, and more people have the capacity to weigh in on the value and virtue of media and commentary. In older media forms the boundaries between authorship and readership, speaker and listener, producer and consumer remained quite clear. “The new Web”, as professor Leon Watts notes “has broken down the authorship-readership roles into degrees of contact and reciprocation of infinitely variable granularity” (Personal Communication). In decentralizing the control over the flow of global information, Web 2.0 holds tremendous potential to shift the balance of power from the elite to the masses, with all of the chaos, creativity, exceptionality and mediocrity that have marked the expansion of political democracy.

Whether or not this potential is realized, whether or not the key Web 2.0 design principle of simplify contributing leads to gains in democratization depends on how developers, publishers, telecommunications companies and users negotiate the evolving spaces that allow for all this communication. Before considering possible scenarios for the future impact of Web 2.0 platforms on society, we should now examine what some of these platforms are and how they are evolving.

Instantiations of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 technologies may be animated by a single design principle, simplify contributing, but they take a wide array of forms. Some of the most visible Web 2.0 tools are categories of platforms. One of the first platforms of the Read/Write Web was Web logs, or blogs, which are websites that are like public journals. Blog authors, or bloggers, post chronologically-ordered journal entries to a site, and each entry has a feature that allows readers to comment, allowing for two-way interaction. Blog hosting services like Blogger, now owned by Google, developed around the turn of the century and allowed even people without any programming skills to create and publish blogs. Wikis, websites which are authored by a community of people, emerged as another platform that allowed for easy, collaborative publication of information. The most famous wiki, Wikipedia, is authored by millions of anonymous contributors, and indeed anyone can click on any page in Wikipedia at any time and add anything that they so desire. Podcasting tools allowed for the uploading and syndication of audio files, and podcasts are a kind of audio blog. YouTube pioneered online video sharing by creating a space where people could upload small video files and make them publically available. These diverse spaces have fostered new forms of global, multimedia, communication and publication.

Online social networks also fall within the domain of Web 2.0. In America, the two largest sites are MySpace and Facebook, where users create a web page profile, invite friends to connect to their profile, and use the page as a space to publish personal content and connect with friends and co-workers. While broad scale online social networks are the most well known, niche social networks exist as well, and services like Ning allow users to create their own mini online social networks, such as Classroom 2.0, a social network for educators interested in Web 2.0. Virtual worlds, including online games, are, to some degree, other forms of online social networks, where users create avatars which inhabit three-dimensional virtual worlds. Second Life is the largest online virtual world community, and World of Warcraft, with over 10 million members worldwide, is the world’s largest online game community. Both virtual worlds are also integrated with other forms of Web 2.0 tools like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis.

For those who have not closely followed the growth of Web 2.0, the scale of adoption is staggering. In America in 2006, over 50% of teenagers – across racial and socioeconomic lines – have created pages on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and in all likelihood this percentage has increased in the last two years (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007). As of October 2008, Wikipedia had over 2.5 million pages, over 250 million page edits, over 8 million registered users, and over 150,000 people who had made an edit in the last 30 days. In February of 2008 Technorati was tracking over 112 million blogs, which doesn’t include as many as 73 million Chinese blogs (Helmond 2008). Even in the US education sector, which was rated dead last out of 30 sectors in technology adoption by the Department of Commerce in 2003, Web 2.0 is growing exponentially. PBwiki reports hosting over 250,000 education related wikis; Wikispaces reports that they have given away over 100,000 free wikis to K12 educators and they plan on donating 250,000 more; and Edublogs hosts over 100,000 education related blogs. And while these are statistics from some of the largest Web 2.0 service providers, they represent only a fraction of online applications within the education sector.

Web 2.0 refers to these simple, often free tools for adding content to the Web, but it also refers to systems that allow users to evaluate content. Tagging refers to the process of allowing users to apply key word labels to discrete bits of content. The service del.icio.us, for instance, allows users to tag Web sites such that del.icio.us community can bypass search engines like Google and instead search the Web using user-generated key words. This form of content organization has been dubbed “folksonomy,” a taxonomy generated organically by a community. Tagging is an essential feature of many Web 2.0 content sharing sites, like Flikr, a popular service for sharing photos.

Indeed this kind of convergence is one of the most common features in the evolution of Web 2.0 tools. User-generated videos from YouTube are embedded in wikis; podcasts are hosted by blogs, commerce sites like Amazon.com allow users to tag products and post reviews. Facebook attempts to serve as an individual’s one-stop Web 2.0 hub, allowing users to chat, post updates, blog, share links, host photos, share videos, coordinate events, share music, and so forth. As Web 2.0 develops, many features of the various platforms are converging and overlapping.

The development of Web 2.0 is also characterized by new innovations. Right now in America, one of the fastest growing Web 2.0 services is Twitter, which allows for micro-blogging. Users post, either online or through mobile phones, status updates of 160 characters or less. Individually, most posts are trivial. Taken collectively, they allow users to track the daily ebb and flow of another person’s life, creating a remarkable sense of intimacy and familiarity (Thompson, 2008). Twitter is now being integrated with Facebook and other tools, so that microblogging is just now entering the Web 2.0 milieu.

The ownership of these diverse spaces deserves careful consideration. Many of these platforms are created and managed by teams of volunteers who release their products under licenses like GNU or creative commons that allow others to share and build upon their achievements. Wikipedia is run by a non-profit agency funded by user donations, Wordpress gives away their blogging platform, and MediaWiki gives away a wiki platform. Other platforms are proprietary and for profit: Google owns Blogger and YouTube, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, and so forth. The transmission of data that enables these communications is made possible by telecommunications companies that are regulated by governments around the world. In many dimensions, the newly enabled communications of millions of users depend upon the infrastructure provided by corporations and governments, and the boundaries and possibilities of new communications will be negotiated by users, corporate interests and governments. Corporations may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize profits and governments may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize state control. Whether or not the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0 are realized depends a great deal upon the degree to which users can negotiate for freedom and autonomy within the networks created and controlled by established political and corporate interests.

The broad future direction of Web 2.0

The driving force behind Web 2.0, the desire to lower the costs of communication, will continue to be a force shaping the web in the decades ahead, and innovations in time-cheap communications are going to present a future full of new surprises. Three other trends at various levels will continue to act on and shape this driving force. First, new platforms will continue to emerge. Second, the functionality in platforms will continue to converge. Third, we should expect to see greater integration between Web 2.0 tools and handheld devices. Finally, we should consider the efforts to those who seek not to extend the Web 2.0 regime, but to transcend it.

Platforms

It’s hard to guess which web communication platforms are going to stick and which are going to fall to the wayside – the book has been pretty durable, the 8-track less so – but we can make some guesses. To step back and think broadly for a moment, platforms are essentially defined by their level of automation. Automation makes certain communication acts time-cheaper, but automation also acts as a constraint on communication forms. Blogs are highly automated. They take new posts and new comments, and they place them in chronological order. This means that making an online journal with collaborative comments is quite time-cheap, but it also means that it’s difficult to make a blog anything other than an online journal. Wikis, by contrast, are the blank canvases of the online world. Almost nothing is automated in a wiki, and so they have a tremendously flexible format which is much more time-expensive to manually design.

Blogs and wikis are two of the formats which seem to have a great potential to prove quite durable. The free, flexible nature of the wiki means that it will likely continue to be suitable for innovative new structural arrangements. The enduring nature of the journal across time and cultures suggests that blogs will long have a place. Likely developers will find new ways to make communication within these platforms cheaper and easier, but these durable platforms seem well-poised to endure.

Some of the more proprietary platforms are perhaps more vulnerable to replacement. Online social networks are probably going to persist in the decades ahead, but five years ago one might have predicted that MySpace would dominate in America, whereas Facebook has begun to very successfully compete broadly with MySpace, especially amongst the demographic of Americans with higher levels of education. As more adults join Facebook, it may be that youth look to escape to a new network (Friending your parents is very uncomfortable… not friending your parents even more so), and perhaps a new space will be born.

Undoubtedly new platforms will also emerge as people develop new ways to make certain forms of communication time-cheap. Some of these may be rather obvious in retrospect, like Goodreads, which allows readers to share lists of what they are reading, lists of their favourite books, and lists of the books on their to-read list. Others applications, like Twitter, may appear quite strange as they appear because they represent new forms of social communication.

Convergence

Virtually all wiki platforms have built-in discussion boards. The Wordpress blog editor has a built-in static web page creator and publisher. Facebook integrates seamlessly with Twitter and a 1,000 other applications. Podcasts can be distributed through blogs. Platforms which began as serving one particular function are increasingly being combined and woven into other platforms. Teens used to send instant messages through systems like AOL Instant Messenger, but increasingly chat online through integrated chat in Gmail or Facebook. In America, Facebook seems well posed to be the primary launching point to the Web 2.0 world for many Americans, and other services like the start page for Google Apps is competing for the same title of home base. Some of the clear distinctions which now exist among platforms may cease to exist as tools increasingly adopt the functionality of other tools.

Handheld devices

Gcast is a service that allows any phone user to dial a phone number, record a message, and have that message published as a podcast within minutes. Jott is a service that transcribes and emails or publishes phone messages. Twitter updates can be made and read by text message, email, or on the web.

As handheld devices develop more sophisticated interfaces, increased functionality, and the ability to transmit more information more quickly, it’s likely that handhelds are going to make Web 2.0 platforms increasingly portable. Right now the clunkiness of thumb pads, the small sizes of screens, and the low bandwidth of mobile phones are limiting their integration into Web 2.0 platforms. It’s not time-cheap to add an article to Wikipedia through your mobile if you have to type out a whole article with your thumb and can only read 20 words of it at a time on your screen. However, as developers overcome these hurdles, mobile phones and other handheld devices will increasingly become integrated into the Read/Write web. At some level, this will simply mean more communication, but we should also expect qualitatively different forms of communication to emerge as well.

Web 3.0 and beyond…

Predicting the “knight’s move,” the radical changes that will reshape social phenomena is always a difficult task, though in the realm of science and technology we at least have the advantage that researchers and developers who are working on new breakthroughs are toiling in plain sight. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, one of the founders of the World Wide Web, has been working for some time on developing tools to allow a “Semantic Web,” or a version of the web where computers would be able recognize the meaning of data at some level (Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila 2001). For instance, search engines can currently find every web page where the word “cat” appears. Clever programmers can even get computers to recognize that the work “cat” appears so frequently with the word “pet” that those words probably have some relationship. Computers cannot however, know what cat means or figure out that cats are a subset of pets. In the Semantic Web, computers would be able to identify these types of relationships, and thus one could do a web search for the phrase “all the types of pets” and the computer would not merely search for websites with those exact words, but would search throughout the data of the web to find all of the data considered a subset of pet, and then return that data to the user. Such a web would dramatically increase the meaning-making capacity of computers, allowing humans to focus even more of their time and energy on higher order thinking tasks, just as search engines on the web have allowed humans to find massive amounts of information in much less time.

Web 2.0 across the sectors

No facet of modern life will remain untransformed by the innovations of the Web 2.0. That’s a strong claim, but in the face of the scope and scale of the social transformations wrought by Web 2.0, it increasingly appears to be a defensible one. Across nearly every sector of the world, Web 2.0 is changing the way people interact and relate.

Business

Web 2.0 tools are sparking two major changes in business practices: how employees collaborate, and how businesses interact with customers. At the MathWorks near Boston, MA, software engineers are designing their entire products on wikis. Programmers no longer email snippets of code back and forth as they attempt to create and debug new features. Instead, programmers post their work to a wiki, which allows the entire MathWorks engineering community ready access to the entire database of code for their products. At BestBuy, the sales force of “Blue Shirts” participates in an online social network called Blue Shirt Nation, where employees can share strategies, give feedback to management, react to new products and campaigns, and help to shape the overall direction of the company (Li and Bernoff, 2008).

These practices represent both new efficiencies and new relationships within firms, and as of this moment it’s not yet clear which of these innovations will prove transformative. New efficiencies produced by collaborative work environments may be merely useful or they may be essential. Can a consumer durable retailer which has not harnessed the collective intelligence of its sales force compete with one who has? We may find that in certain economic sectors harnessing collective intelligence is more important than in other places, or we may find that firms who can use new Web 2.0 tools to empower their employees consistently out-compete those who do not.

Online networks may also upset hierarchical corporate structures. Will online communities within firms represent a new avenue for employee advancement? Will the Best Buy sales rep with the highest numbers be passed over for manager in favour of another employee who made several critical contributions to Blue Shirt Nation? Will the MathWorks wiki allow the most creative, productive programmers to be identified and recognized for their work, rather than the project manager who compiles and presents the final project to executives? These new platforms may allow different kinds of talents – talents related to online networking, communication and collaboration – to be more highly valued in the work place. They also may allow for employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to more easily bend the ear of those at the top, and the examples of both Linux development and the Toyota production system lend support to this hypothesis (Evans and Wolf, 2005). These flatter, more democratic, more meritocratic social organizations may allow firms to draw out the strengths of their employees with less regard towards their position in the organization.

Lowering communication costs is also likely to accelerate the pace of globalization and outsourcing. As it becomes increasingly easier to collaborate online, both asynchronously and in real time, firms can employ people around the world and have those teams work together. For developing countries, this represents an incredible new opportunity for nations that can build the infrastructure for people to participate in this phenomena. For developed countries, it means greater competition in the global labour market.

Web 2.0 tools are also changing the ways that firms interact with consumers. For one rather silly example, take the case of the American film “Snakes on a Plane.” When New Line Cinema published that title amongst their list of films in development in 2005, it captured the attention of a segment of film buffs on the internet. Perhaps it was the way the title succinctly captures the central conflict of the film; perhaps it unlocked some deep psychological tensions around flying in post 9/11 America. In any event, blogs about the film sprouted, fans started generating and sharing content about a film that had not even been created yet. Fans knew that Samuel L. Jackson was to play a lead role, and one fan produced a sound clip where he imitated Jackson saying “I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!” The clip went viral – it spread rapidly through social networks and outside traditional publication channels – amongst fans of this yet-to-be movie, and the fans demanded that the line be added to the movie. So the studio went back into production in order to add the line, which became the signature moment of the film.

That moment represents a powerful symbolic change in the relationship between producers and consumers. The fans were not the simple recipients of the movie; instead, they helped to design the film. They were co-constructors of the product, and through that co-construction not only did they improve the product (in a marketing sense, if not an artistic one), but they also felt a greater sense of investment in the product. These fans, with their blogs, fan sites, and media clips, became a free marketing arm for New Line, and produced a buzz around the movie that few campy B-movies can hope to achieve.

Web 2.0 tools allow many variations on these kinds of two-way communication amongst firms and consumers. At Snorg T’s, about 1/3 of their ideas for new t-shirts, sold over the internet, come from consumers. At threadless.com, consumers not only submit t-shirt designs but vote on the ones that they want the company to produce, market and sell. Companies as diverse as Dell and Stonyfield Farms use blogs to talk and listen to consumers (Scoble and Israel, 2006). Proctor and Gamble launched Beinggirl.com as a space for girls to talk with each other and with health care professionals about issues of relationships and sexuality, sponsored throughout by advertisements for beauty and feminine care products (Li and Bernoff, 2008). As I write this, JetBlue airways has just announced its first flight from its new terminal at JFK via Twitter, sending the message directly to its 6,000 followers on Twitter. In these conversations, firms not only have the chance to learn from their consumers, but also to communicate directly with them, unfiltered through the media. In the best of circumstances, firms can help consumers feel like partners in the life of corporate products; consumers become part of the team.

Looking towards the future, if all that corporations do with these tools is find new ways to sell their products, then that won’t constitute a significant change in the economic sphere. If companies, however, go further in terms of listening to consumers, towards building partnerships with them, towards responding to their concerns and ideas, then we may see new ways for the marketplace to better serve consumers. If firms discover that they can draw strength from the ideas of consumers, that they can grow by building partnerships from consumers, and that they are vulnerable to widespread, online criticism of consumers, then that may shift the balance of power in capitalist society from the producers towards the consumers.

An alternative future where producers simply use Web 2.0 as a new medium to share advertising and propaganda with consumers is equally imaginable. BeingGirl.com may develop as an open forum where girls have a chance to speak with each other and with professionals about the challenging issues of adolescence, and Proctor and Gamble may get some incidental benefits from fostering this open space. On the other hand, Proctor and Gamble can exert powerful editorial controls over the content on BeingGirl in order to manipulate conversations towards the celebration of P&G products and the positioning of young girls as deficient beings without those products. We have to expect that Proctor and Gamble only cares about the interests of young girls to the extent that those interests coincide with their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. In these corporate sponsored spaces, which include Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and many others, users and corporations will negotiate the norms of each space, and in the best possible future these negotiations will result in consumers working with producers to create a better marketplace. In the worst possible future, producers will use online spaces as a forum for cynical advertising to penetrate ever more deeply into the lives of consumers.

Politics and the civic sphere

Those who research the emerging Web trends in society are going to spend a considerable amount of time unpacking the role of the internet and other communication technologies in the Barack Obama presidential campaign. The Obama campaign reached out to voters through a wide variety of existing web platforms. The campaign has pages and groups on a variety of social network sites, posts regular updates on Twitter (where Obama has 100,000 followers), posts videos on YouTube, uploads pictures from the campaign trail to Flickr, and participates in other niche platforms like Faithbase and BlackPlanet. After Obama’s victory, we have good reason to believe that Web 2.0 tools will be an established feature of political campaigns.

The Obama campaign built a proprietary online community of over 1,000,000 members called my.barackobama.com (myBO). Users at myBO could join groups based on states, neighbourhood or interests (like Tango dancers or air traffic controllers). They signed up to contact local undecided voters in their neighborhood and received “Walk lists” in seconds. Users could create a fundraising page which tracked their efforts at getting friends and family to donate to the campaign, and they could create their own blogs with which to share their thoughts with others. While myBO posed a number of strong constraints within the network in order to maintain their message and brand, they allowed remarkable freedom to users in creating their own blogs and fundraising messages. These messages were screened, and objectionable language was removed and led to users being banned, but on the whole the campaign allowed users to craft their own personal message of support in the service of a shared goal.

All of these messages were also shared outside the bounds of the official Obama network. In some cases, users shared the Obama message by posting Obama updates to their own social network profile, or sharing YouTube videos from the campaign by email. At the same time, Obama supporters also took ownership of his message and created their own groups and communication platforms. Many people individually created their own blogs or groups, like the Obama-Mama blog or the Facebook group “I have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin.”

These tools allowed the Obama campaign to achieve two objectives. First, they used communication tools to speak directly to millions of voters and potential voters without being filtered through the media. The decision to announce Obama pick for V.P. via text message at an early morning hour allowed the Obama campaign to send their message directly to the voters, rather than mediated through some kind of press release or press conference. Consider the costs of sending all of the words, images and videos distributed by the Obama campaign through a combination of media ads and direct mailing: it would be a staggering sum. The costs of transmitting these materials become entirely manageable using the web, and in fact, Obama volunteers and supporters absorbed much of the cost of those interactions.

The role of volunteers in sharing the message speaks to the second online objective achieved through Web 2.0 tools: getting a small army of grass-roots supporters involved in the campaign. The online tools dramatically reduced the cost of mobilizing huge numbers of volunteers and supporters. Those volunteers worked both through official channels, like those who volunteered to print out Obama walk lists, and through unofficial channels, like those who posted an Obama video to their social network profile or blog outside of myBO. The Obama campaign’s online efforts gave supporters an online stake in the campaign and even gave them some control over personally shaping their version of the Obama message. By sharing this stake, the campaign unlocked entirely new bases of small donors, of volunteers, and of new voters.

While the Obama campaign is certainly the most prominent example of online civic mobilization, many other examples exist as well. On February 12, 2003, the largest coordinated protest in human history occurred across the world in opposition to the Iraq war, where somewhere between 12 and 20 million people took to the streets (Bennett, 2007). The protest was organized in a matter of months, and online communication played a critical role. At www.350.org, activists are mobilizing people to demand action on greenhouse gas emissions and reduce atmospheric carbon down to 350 ppm. At 350.org people can join the movement, find out about upcoming actions, organize their own actions and spread the word. Facebook has an application where individuals can create profiles dedicated to causes, where people can invite their friends to donate to or join in an action or effort. These tools will play an increasingly important role in grass-roots action over the decades ahead.

Just as we could imagine two alternative futures for Web 2.0 tools in the economic sphere – one which enhanced consumer power and one which co-opted consumer energy in the service of corporate power, so can we imagine two futures for these new political media. Whether you believe that Barack Obama is The One, That One, or just the next one, one has to assume that he’ll be under constant pressure to use his online network as a tool for generating support for his agenda rather than as a medium for developing his agenda. If myBO becomes another media for the Obama administration to spread a centrally constructed message, then it becomes another instrument of elite political power. If, however, myBO morphs into my.americangovernment.gov, a space where citizens have the opportunity to contribute and collaborate on solving problems and speaking truth to power, then the democratizing power of Web 2.0 tools may indeed lead to a more democratic republic. Given the pressure on politicians to consolidate their power, one has to assume that the better future will only come about if the citizenry organizes to demand that it happen.

Journalism and the media are also being profoundly affected by the emergence of Web 2.0 tools. In some cases, new media are simply being integrated into old media. Many New York Times columns are also published as blogs, and readers can comment back on the blogs, and columnists can respond to those responses in future columns. Certainly this kind of dialogue happened with letters in the past, but the communication is now faster and at a greater scale. More importantly, anyone can now read almost all of the comments left behind by others, so nearly the entire communication stream is publically available. The editorial control over the “letters to the editor” is greatly loosened, so hundreds of comments are published rather than just a few letters. Anyone who is willing to avoid vitriolic personal attacks and foul or hateful language can have their say on the pages of NYTimes.com and dozens of other newspapers.

Web 2.0 tools also allow new journalism platforms to emerge outside of the traditional media. The Drudge Report and the Daily Kos are two examples of partisan blog networks providing political news and opinion outside of the traditional corporate journalism structure. Blogs that provide coverage of niches, like particular celebrities, trends, or market sectors, have proven to be particularly successful in finding readerships in the media marketplace. In some cases, this citizen journalism has proven to be a powerful check on the mainstream media, such as when bloggers discovered and then demonstrated that documents that Dan Rather used to criticize George W. Bush’s Texas Air Guard record were fabricated. In other cases, Web 2.0 tools have been the source of media stories, such as when Senator George Allen called a young Indian man a Macaca at a campaign event, a racial slur which was captured on video and published on YouTube for the media to pick up on. Web 2.0 tools have both allowed new voices into journalism, and they have created a new bank of user-generated media to inform journalism. Established media conglomerates will undoubtedly attempt to harness, control and profit from these new domains, but the ease of creating and publishing widely available media suggests that media consumers will have a far wider array of media choices in the future, and they will have more opportunities to interact with others in national and international conversations about news events.

Relationships and identity

Friend is now a verb. To “friend” someone is to solicit or accept an invitation from another person on an online social network that denotes that person as one of your friends. In this context, friends are not necessarily friends as in other contexts. Friends may be acquaintances from school or work rather than people who you choose to have a social, affectionate relationship with. Yet the power of these online friendships is that Web 2.0 tools can allow them to have a degree of intimacy that offline friendships may not necessarily have.

For instance, this past summer I took a group of students to India. While in India, I left new status updates from the road, and when I returned I posted a series of photo albums to my Facebook site. I have several very dear, close, offline friends who know nothing about this trip; we have not been in touch since then. I also have several acquaintances in my Facebook network who I have not spoken to in years, who I don’t feel particularly emotionally close to, who followed this expedition quite closely. If I run into them, they can ask about what it was like to cross the high pass at 16,000 feet in the India Himalaya or about my relationship with Lado, the Indian mechanic who helped us with our service project. In several important respects, my Facebook friends know the shifting landscape of my moods, activities, and journey through life better than some of my offline friends with whom I have close emotional bonds but only a weak sense of the contours of their current life. For those outside the world online social networks, it’s easy to imagine that Facebook friends aren’t real friends. But when I look at who understands my life right now, the question “who are my real friends?” becomes much more complicated. In a sense, I have a whole new category of friends with whom I share a whole new category of intimacy. Social capital theory gives us a robust framework to understand how these relationships work as weak ties (Putnam, 2000), but social capital theory in its present form does not necessarily account for the significance of the new levels of intimacy that I have development with my acquaintances. As online social networks transform our social landscape, fundamental and remarkably durable notions of relationships and identity may evolve.

For many young people especially, the online world now is a parallel social space to the offline world. Just as teenagers carefully cultivate an image in school, through dress, activities, friendships, and conversations, so do teens carefully cultivate a second image offline. In shaping their MySpace or Facebook page, teenagers carefully choose which photos of themselves to display, what books and movies to list as their favorites, who to accept and reject as friends, and what other information and images should adorn their “profile.” Just as students may express one identity in the classroom, another in church, and another on the basketball court, so students can experiment with new identities online. In many cases, the lack of instant social feedback from acts of identity-shaping may allow people to be bolder in experimenting with self-expression; you might be taunted immediately for wearing an Arsenal jersey in the halls of a Manchester high school, but you have some insulation from insults if you post a picture of Adebayor on your profile, at least until your online friends find you. Certain online spaces are specifically designed for this identity experimentation and role-play. James Gee, writing about video games, describes the capacity to create “projective identities” in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Second Life, where people can experiment with designing new identities for virtual representations, or avatars, of themselves (Gee, 2007). These games, which require communication not only in game, but through other mechanisms like guild sites, forums, wikis, and blogs, allow people to experiment with new identities in new domains.

Exploration of how these online networks are reforming notions of identity has only just begun, but as one example of the changing social landscape consider the notion of persistence. The mobility of modern life in the West has allowed many people the opportunity to “start over” with a new identity. High school kids go off to college, people change jobs, switch schools, move to a different town. Someone who tires of being the class clown in middle school can try to shape a new identity in a new high school; someone who was a chess nerd in high school can join a party fraternity in college. Part of what enables these new experiments is the chance to abandon an old identity. But what happens to the nature of these changes if people travel from one offline social world to another while maintaining a consistent online social identity? What does it mean to have a single Facebook page from middle school through one’s working life? Is one’s Facebook profile sufficiently malleable to allow significant changes in identity, or does the durable nature of one’s public, online identity constrain people’s efforts to experiment as someone new? Some initial research suggests that the complexity of privacy setting tools in Facebook restricts people’s ability to maintain old ties while entering new communities with different expectations, but we have much more to learn (DiMicco and Millen 2007). Answering these questions will be critical to psychologists and other social scientists, to educators and parents, and to young people in the years ahead.

Over time, the English language has developed such that “virtual” is the antonym of “real,” and if social scientists accept this opposition, they will miss some of the most important phenomena developing in modern social relationships. Relationships developed in virtual or online worlds are not pale reflections of “real” world phenomena. They are a new class of meaningful and profound interactions which researchers will have to consider seriously as they try to understand the evolving nature of society in a Web 2.0 world.

Education

On the slow pace of adoption

There is a subversive joke told amongst education technology advocates that if Rip van Winkle awoke today, he wouldn’t recognize or understand the work in an architect’s office where the drawings are done by AutoCAD, in a mechanic’s garage where computers run diagnostic tests, or at a retail counter where sales are made and tracked by computer. All of these places and interactions would be radically different from the world the Rip fell asleep in, but if Mr. van Winkle walked into a classroom where students were sitting in rows listening to teachers lecture by the blackboard, then Rip would finally feel right at home.

As Web 2.0 technologies reshape nearly every aspect of modern life, their adoption has been relatively slow within the classroom. “Relatively” needs to be put into perspective: three providers alone, PBWiki, Wikispaces, and Edublogs claim to host nearly half a million education-related blogs and wikis. In all likelihood, millions more are hosted on other large public services, on course-management systems like Moodle or Blackboard, on proprietary systems for particular schools, and through other means, though there is no certain way to count. So on the one hand, in terms of raw numbers we are seeing an exponential growth in the adoption of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, and on the other hand we are seeing very little evidence that this adoption is penetrating normal classroom routines. Reconciling this tension will help us understand the present and future of these tools in the classroom.

Hypothesised benefits

Very little academic research has centered on Web 2.0 tools in education. From the literature that does exists though, one can unearth hypothesized benefits for using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom with students, which can be organized into four major categories. The first category involves increasing engagement. On the one hand, we have some evidence that by allowing students to publish in a public space over which they have some control and ownership, students are motivated by the chance to work in Web 2.0 environments. Several small studies and experiments suggest that students who write using these technologies write longer pieces, write more frequently, claim to take greater pride in their work, and claim to enjoy the process more (Cole, 2004; Dunleavy, Dexter, and Heinecke, 2007; Grant, 2006; Olander, 2007). Students enjoy the chance to use tools in schools that they use socially in the rest of their lives, and they enjoy the opportunities to connect and collaborate (Reich, 2008) . They are also pressured, usually in a positive way, to perform better when their work is public. They appreciate opportunities to connect with the world outside their classroom. At the same time educators also have observed that Web 2.0 tools allow increased participation in class discussions, since those who struggle to communicate orally have another avenue to contribute (Ellis, Goodyear, Prosser, and O’Hara, 2006; Reich, 2008).

Building on this increased engagement, Web 2.0 tools provide new avenues to teach fundamental skills, like writing, communication, collaboration, and new media literacy. One small recent study showed that students who blogged improved their writing skills more than students who completed assignments by hand or through word-processing (Roth, 2007). The author argued that these gains were largely connected to motivation, and while the sample of the study may be small, the results are suggestive if not conclusive. Another recent study showed that students may learn reasoning skills in online communication with their peers more than they learn such skills when modeled by adult instructors (Ellis et al 2006). The capacity of these tools to nurture collaboration skills has been noted by several authors (Reich and Daccord, 2008; Richardson, 2008) who argue that the communally-constructed nature of Web 2.0 spaces forces students to figure out how to work together to create final products. Several researchers have investigated the promises and challenges to use Web 2.0 tools to develop these kinds of collaboration skills (Armetta, 2007; Coyle, 2007). In addition to these established skills, other researchers, like Henry Jenkins at MIT, have noted that the proliferation of new media has necessitated learning a whole new set of literacies, like understanding distributed cognition and transmedia navigation, and of course it makes sense to study new media literacies in the context of new media platforms (Jenkins, 2007).

In addition to developing both old and new fundamental skills, students also need to rehearse for 21^st century situations. As noted above, businesses are adopting Web 2.0 tools at an astounding rate, and students in schools need to have access to the communication media that are at least similar to the types of environments that they will be expected to use in the future (Laurinen and Marttunen, 2007). In one specific example, several researchers have noted that most classroom writing instruction looks absolutely nothing like the kinds of writing that employees are expected to do in the work force. Collaborative writing where iterations are workshopped by multiple people using online media are the norm in many workplaces, whereas these practices are the rare exception in education (Garza and Hern, 2005). Researchers have also recognized that collaborative digital media is an increasingly important part of the civic sphere, both nationally and globally, and Civic Life Online (2008) provides numerous examples both of how people are organizing in the 21^st century to meet civic goals and some early efforts to ready students to participate in these new efforts (Bennett, 2007).

Underlying all of these proposed benefits is the notion that the normal routine of school life is insufficient for preparing students for the new labour force and civic sphere. As Levy and Murnane (2004) argue, computers are increasingly replacing many of the repetitive tasks that used to be performed by significant parts of the human labour force. As a result, schools need to prepare students with new skills where humans have a comparative advantage over computers, especially in terms of complex communication and critical thinking. Since Web 2.0 tools offer new mechanisms for teaching these critical skills which schools so often fail to teach, emerging Web tools can enlighten the critique of the contemporary state of education. The best Web 2.0 projects, which we will turn to in a moment, demonstrate the extraordinary capacity for communication tools to enrich our learning, especially in contrast to an educational system grounded in print technology and an industrial infrastructure. While technology may play a role in highlighting the needs for change, technology alone will not provide reform. As Prof. Barry Fishman has argued, “Technology needs school reform more than school reform needs technology” (Personal Communication).

The potential and reality of Web 2.0 tools

The best instantiations of Web 2.0 tools are extraordinary, and the bulk are, unfortunately, quite ordinary and quite well suited for fairly standard instructional models.

There are hundreds of exemplary examples of Web 2.0 projects (many of which can be found at edublogawards.com), and I’ll highlight just one here. The Flat Classroom Project of 2007, hosted at flatclasroomproject.wikispaces.com, was a collaboration amongst eight classrooms in America, Shanghai, Austria, Qatar, and India. Students in the classroom were divided into 10 teams of students from around the world in order to study the 10 world flatteners from Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat (Friedman, 2007). Each team took one of the world flatteners and explored its impact by creating a wiki page which included video, images, and collaboratively composed text. The videos were shot in one country and then “outsourced” to another for editing, so a student might film something in Qatar to be edited in America. The essays that followed the videos were written collaboratively, and the discussion pages “behind” the main project pages show the various project management, communication and teamwork skills that students needed to practice in order to successfully complete the project. In the process of designing the wiki page, students undertook a critical examination of an important phenomena and then worked together to create a multimedia performance of their understanding.

While no studies have looked widely across Web 2.0 tools, there is anecdotal evidence that this kind of project is a very rare exception to two normal states. The first normal state with Web 2.0 is failure. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs and wikis created, most die on the vine. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one of the advantages of Web 2.0 is that they are both inexpensive and time-cheap to create, and so one can fail repeatedly before finding a model that works. That said, these failed instantiations are not realizing any of the aforementioned hypothesized benefits. The second normal state for Web 2.0 tools are applications that fit neatly into standard, industrial models of education. In these states, a wiki might be used as an easy way for a teacher to create a website as a one-way delivery device for content, rather than a collaborative medium. Or perhaps a student creates a blog as a kind of online portfolio, but her writings are never published widely, never shared with others, or never commented upon by classmates. In a sense the blog has allowed the student to pass in her homework online, but none of the potentially benefits of publishing within a larger critical, collaborative community are realized. If these two states are indeed the norm, then right now Web 2.0 tools may offer tremendous potential for education, but this potential is not much realized.

There is also anecdotal evidence that the distribution of the use of these tools, sophisticated or not, is skewed towards wealthy, suburban communities rather than poorer rural or urban communities. In theory, free and simple Web 2.0 tools that can build learning communities within and beyond schools should be able to benefit a wide variety of students equitably. Indeed, under-resourced schools might plausibly even benefit disproportionately, since networked computing technologies can be used to bring a wide variety of intellectual resources into low-income communities, where higher-income communities can afford to bring more of those intellectual resources directly into the classroom. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the scenario currently unfolding.

I hypothesize that the distribution of Web 2.0 tools is indeed uneven, and that schools that are more wealthy, more white, more selective, and more suburban are more likely to employ Web 2.0 teaching tools than schools where students are poorer, non-white, and from urban or rural communities. Though no empirical research has been done on this topic, my hypothesis has been shaped by anecdotal evidence from conversations with educators, online discussions amongst academic technology integrationists, and evaluations of renowned education-related wikis, blogs and social networks. At a first glance, it appears that new opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 tools are primarily available to those students with access to many other types of opportunities. Henry Jenkins (2007) has raised similar concerns around this “participation gap” between wealthy and middle class students with access to participatory online communities and working class students who are being left behind.

Moreover, I expect that there is not only a difference in the distribution of these tools, but qualitative inequities in their application. Researchers have found that instruction in poor, non-white, urban schools is dominated by didactic, teacher-centered forms of instruction, where white, suburban students enjoy more interactive, student-centered teaching (Diamond 2007). I believe that these inequities will extend into the digital domain, and that urban schools in low-income communities will use Web 2.0 tools in more teacher-centered, less collaborative ways than suburban schools in higher-income communities. Furthermore, it seems likely that this didactic instruction in under-resourced schools will be focused on training students on basic skills, and the more interactive instruction in wealthier school will involve nurturing students in the critical thinking and complex communication skills that are essential to the 21^st century (Levy and Murnane 2004). Thus in the absence of policy interventions, it may be that low-income students will have less access to educational experiences with Web 2.0 tools, and the experiences that they do have will be less collaborative, less empowering, and less relevant to the future needs of society.

Future scenarios for Web 2.0 in education

The picture painted above is a fairly gloomy picture of Web 2.0 in education: these tools have tremendous potential to nurture the skills that students will need for the 21^st century civic and economic spheres, and yet these tools remained largely under-utilized, especially in under-resourced environments. And without fairly dramatic intervention, there is no reason to believe that this will change in the future.

Educational institutions are conservative ones. In many systems, teachers are not fully professionalized, and very few systems have incentives that reward teachers for innovative instruction. A teacher who lectures at the front of the class gets paid the same as one who pours his heart into developing multimedia, cross-cultural collaborative projects. So classrooms prove remarkably resistant to change.

Changing the orientation of schools towards 21^st century skills and teaching methods would be hard enough, and it’s made even harder in America by standards-based instruction which directs schools to focus more on 19^th and 20^th century basic skills. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law forces schools, especially schools serving low-performing students, to focus on preparing students to take standardized tests in basic skills almost to the exclusion of every other goal. Within schools who feel threatened by the NCLB regime, there is a strong disincentive to focus on 21^st century skills that will not be measured by standardized tests. The principle at work in America and applicable across all contexts is that education regimes which measure success through standardized tests that demand performances of rote memory are unlikely to produce teachers who prepare their students for performances of 21^st century skill demonstration.

As a result of these disincentives, teachers who want to wisely incorporate technology into their instruction are something of a rarity, and they tend to appear in wealthy, suburban schools where the teachers and administrators face little threat of having any significant number of their students fail to pass state tests. As a result, students who already attend schools with a variety of resource advantages, enjoy the additional instructional advantages of using Web 20 tools to develop fundamental skills and rehearse for 21^st century environments, while their less well-off peers enjoy fewer opportunities in schools with fewer resources. Even extraordinary efforts to put more computers and bigger network connections in urban schools will provide little amelioration to the inequity because the appearance of machines is not going to change the incentive structure which rewards teachers who use computers for drilling students on basic math problems but not for involving them in collaborative, public performances of their understanding. In the most likely scenario unfolding in the United States, and perhaps in other Western countries, free Web 2.0 tools are likely to exacerbate the opportunity/achievement gap, since only schools with the luxury to largely ignore testing requirements will be able to afford the time to experiment with these new tools.

Changing this future scenario would require making some significant changes in the entire educational system. The most likely alternative scenario is one where business leaders demand that the educational system shifts its focus to 21^st century skills, as groups like the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills are trying to do in America. The growing gap between the applications of Web 2.0 tools in the world and in schools may be a critical part of the argument for more 21^st century instruction. Based on that call, national standards and laws would change to reward schools for trying to go beyond the basic skills to teach critical thinking and complex communication, or perhaps teach the basics in the context of these new, critical skills. From there, schools and teachers would have to conduct a campaign of education technology professional development for teachers that used a proportion of resources similar to those invested in getting computers in schools in the first place. Schools of education would need to do more to prepare pre-service teachers for using technology, which would of course require many of the professors in schools of education to learn something about how to go about doing so. These technology reform efforts, however, would need to be driven by a desire to reshape the goals of education, rather than the desire to simply integrate technology. Technology can abet school reform, but it cannot replace it.

There are several other factors which may nudge the future towards or away from greater educational adoption of Web 2.0 tools. As more young teachers, digital natives, enter the teaching service with their technological experience, they may find it easier to adopt new technologies. That said, it is unclear that there is a strong relationship between technological know-how and the use of technology in the classroom. Most teachers learn to teach from their own experience and from mentors, neither of which usually provide an exemplary model for technology use in the classroom.

Certain technological advances could give a nudge towards using more technologies. If the cost of computers drops dramatically, such that 1-1 computing models in schools become broadly feasible, that may allow for greater adoption of a wide variety of computing technologies. It would also help if school adopted software that gave teachers better control over computers, such that teachers could restrict and allow access to certain applications, websites etc. in real time during a class period. Those kinds of structures would make it easier for students to stay on task and easier for teachers to structure and scaffold learning. Internet filters are currently a serious obstacle towards using websites in the classroom. Most filters are knee-high fences around the internet which tech-savvy children jump over easily and which older teachers trip over. In many schools, filters serve to keep teachers off of the internet and away from employing novel teaching strategies while students happily employ proxy servers and other tricks to evade filters. Depending on these technological advances and policy decisions, we may see greater or lesser adoption of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms.

From the perspective of the university, the last thing that might be done to encourage a future where 21^st century skills are taught through practices involving Web 2.0 would be to provide research to the education policy community that can show the benefits of learning 21^st century skills in collaborative online environments and the inequitable distribution of these opportunities.

Gauging the future of the web

The collected works of Shakespeare include three categories of plays. In the comedies, things get better, and in the tragedies things get worse. It is in the histories that we find stories where some people are winners and others are not, and these histories probably provide the best models for predicting the future.

The driving technical principle behind the evolution of Web 2.0 tools is the reduction of the interaction costs of communication, and these costs will continue to be driven down. As these costs are driven down, we will continue to see the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors and the products of these behaviors will be as or more bizarre to future peoples as Wikipedia and Twitter are to us now. These new behaviors will be at some level democratizing, as they will involve harnessing collaborative energy and collective intelligence to meet cooperative goals. Many of these innovations will level hierarchies and include and involve more people in social systems. They will accelerate globalization by making cross-cultural, cross-content, cross-time-zone conversations even cheaper and take less time to achieve.

In some cases, business will use these tools to manipulate people into buying all manner of worthless products, and in other cases business will use these tools to allow consumers to participate in the design of new products that more effectively satisfy human needs. Global warming activists will use the tools to rally massive numbers of people to work to attend to this major crisis, and hate groups will use the tools to rally people together to oppress others. Some schools may use these tools to nurture new skill sets in their students, which may be essential and beneficial to national competitiveness, but create greater inequities between those who have, and those who lack, these 21^st century skills. Other schools will use new media to continue herding students through an outdated, industrialized mode of education. Individuals may develop wider networks of online friends and fewer close ties, and those without reliable internet access may be locked out of the social networks of prestige and power. Web 2.0 tools will erase some of the challenges of collaborating and communicating across time and geography, and they will enact a series of new challenges in the stead of the old.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

References

Armetta, J. (2007). An epistemological study: Wiki in the composition class. M.A., University of Wyoming.

Bennett, W.L. ed. (2007) Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J. and Lassila, O. (2001) The semantic web. Scientific American, 284 (5), pp34.

Cole, K.L. (2004) Providing the soapbox, developing their voice: An analysis of weblogs as a tool for response to literature in the middle school language arts classroom. Ph.D., The University of Alabama.

Coyle, J.E.,Jr. (2007) Wikis in the college classroom: A comparative study of online and face-to-face group collaboration at a private liberal arts university. Ph.D., Kent State University.

Diamond, J.B. (October 2007) Where the rubber meets the road: Rethinking the connection between high-stakes testing policy and classroom instruction. Sociology of Education, 80 (29), pp285-313.

DiMicco, J.M. and Millen, D.R. (2007) Identity management: Multiple presentations of self in Facebook. GROUP ‘07: Proceedings of the 2007 International ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp383-386.

Dunleavy, M., Dexter, S. and Heinecke, W.F. (2007) What added value does a 1:1 student to laptop ratio bring to technology-supported teaching and learning? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23 (5), pp440-452.

Ellis, R. A., Goodyear, P., Prosser, M. and O’Hara, A. (2006) How and what university students learn through online and face-to-face discussion: Conceptions, intentions and approaches. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 22 (4), pp244-256.

Evans, P., and Wolf, B. (2005) Collaboration rules. Harvard Business Review, 83 (11), pp162-162.

Friedman, T.L. (2007) The world is flat : A brief history of the twenty-first century New York, Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Distributed by Holtzbrinck Publishers.

Garza, S.L. and Hern, T. (2005) Collaborative writing tools: Something wiki this way comes–or not! Kairos, 10 (1)

Gee, J.P. (2007) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy Revised and updat edition. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

Grant, A.C. (2006) The development of global awareness in elementary students through participation in an online cross-cultural project. Ph.D., Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Haste, H. and Hogan, A. (2006) Beyond conventional civic participation, beyond the moral-political divide: Young people and contemporary debates about citizenship. Journal of Moral Education, 35 (4), pp473-493.

Helmond, A. (2008) How many blogs are there? is someone still counting? The Blog Herald. Available from http://www.blogherald.com/2008/02/11/how-many-blogs-are-there-is-someone-still-counting/ Accessed February 11 2008

Jenkins, H. (2007) In: Clinton K., Purushotma R., Robison A. and Weigel M. eds. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Chicago, MacArthur Foundation. Available from www.digitallearning.macfound.org

Laurinen, L.I. and Marttunen, M. J. (2007) Written arguments and collaborative speech acts in practising the argumentative power of language through chat debates. Computers and Composition, 24 (3), pp230-246.

Lenhart, A., Madden, M., Macgill, A.R. and Smith, A. (2007) Teens and social media. Washington, D.C, Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Levy, F. and Murnane, R.J. (2004) The new division of labor : How computers are creating the next job market. Princeton, N.J., New York: Princeton University Press; Russell Sage Foundation.

Li, C. and Bernoff, J. (2008) Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA., Harvard Business Press.

Olander, M.V. (2007) Painting the voice: Weblogs and writing instruction in the high school classroom. Ph.D., Nova Southeastern University.

O’Reilly, T. (September 30, 2005) What is web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Available from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html Accessed April 20, 2008,

Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling alone : The collapse and revival of American community. New York, Simon and Schuster.

Reich, J. (2008, May 13) Turn teen texting towards better writing. Christian Science Monitor, Retrieved from http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0513/p09s02-coop.html

Reich, J. and Daccord, T. (2008) Best ideas for teaching with technology : A practical guide for teachers, by teachers. Armonk, N.Y, M.E. Sharpe.

Richardson, W. (2008) Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA., Corwin Press.

Roth, N.L. (2007) To blog or not to blog? A comparative study of the effects of blogging in the teaching of writing in the high school classroom. Ed.D., Duquesne University.

Scoble, R. and Israel, S. (2006) Naked conversations : How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. Hoboken, N.J., Wiley and Sons.

Thompson, C. (2008, September 5, 2008) Brave new world of digital intimacy. New York Times Magazine, pp.42.

To state that predicting future social trends is a complex business would be to stretch the acceptable bounds of understatement. Predicting the future of citizenship is all the more formidable. However, we should not shrink from such prophetic tasks as it encourages us to confront and, more importantly, consider the concept in all its glorious complexity. Undoubtedly, in recent decades technological advances, particularly the emergence of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has had a tremendous impact on the ways that we live our lives. However, in contrast to the many dizzying changes occurring, certain things, like ourselves, appear to be fundamental and permanent.

This paper examines the future of citizenship within local communities from the perspective of place. The first section proceeds by outlining the important relationship between place and identity and weighs up the existence of a positive relationship between place-identity and local civic engagement. This is followed by considering the impacts of technological development for identity. It is suggested that place will remain fundamental to the construction of identity and community. Nonetheless, CMC is changing the way we think about place and identity relationships, with reference to the emerging importance of virtual spaces and authentication of selfhood. Moreover, physical and virtual aspects of identity and place have already begun to merge.

The paper then moves on to discuss the future of local communities. It is argued that CMC will complement and enhance offline interaction rather than diminish it. A number of studies are discussed that highlight the advantages of CMC for community-building and civic engagement. The final section asserts that citizenship will undergo significant change, in which formally established identities, locations and practices will give way to novel and multiple forms of citizenship that transcend the nation-state. Therefore, in the future citizenship will be characterised by more informal practices, non-traditional identities and alternative spaces.

The role of place in the construction of identity

The academic literature is rich with studies that draw connections between identity and place. This paper takes up Tuan’s (1977) definition of place as physical space invested with meaning. People’s relationships with place are complex, multifaceted and sometimes blend with perceptions of community, thereby combining physical and social aspects of place (Manzo and Perkins 2005). However, others have proposed that each involves a distinct cognitive process of identification (eg Brehm, Eisenhauer and Krannich 2006). A number of concepts have emerged to explain this kind of relationship including ‘sense of place‘, ‘place attachment‘, ‘place dependence‘ and ‘place identity‘ (Manzo 2003). With specific reference to place identity, evidence suggests that a person’s sense of self is partly generated by exposure to physical spaces (Korpela 1989; Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff 1983; Twigger Ross and Uzzell, 1996). Proshansky et al (1983) describe place-identity as ‘…a sub-structure of the self-identity of the person consisting of broadly conceived cognitions about the physical world in which the person lives.’ (p59). People identify with places through psychological investment over time and repeated encounters in which a set of meanings accumulates for that person; a ‘…pot-pourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas and related feelings about specific physical settings as well as other types of settings.’ (p60). Simply being exposed to a place does not lead to identification (Manzo and Perkins 2005), but when they do, the interactions, and the meanings that become attached to significant places underpin a person’s sense of self and belonging.

Disruption to place identity can have profound psychological consequences for individuals. A classic example comes from Fried (1963) in the context of the relocation of suburban community in Boston, Massachusetts. Fried observed a range of profound emotional responses akin to loss after the community was relocated to other parts of the city (see also Cuba and Hummon 1992). Twigger Ross and Uzzell (1996) remark that the sense of loss people experience in being forcibly relocated may persist for decades. This is because people are motivated to maintain a sense of self-continuity, which is sustained by a psychological connection to places that symbolise past selves (place-referent continuity) or transferable features of those places (place-congruent continuity). If this sense of self-continuity is disrupted the person may experience loss. Of course, this does not occur each time an individual moves to a new physical location. People may even choose high mobility lifestyles and some cultures are traditionally nomadic and do not exhibit the same type of emotional response. Twigger Ross (1996) and Giuliani (1991) speculate that key factors appears to be the strength of place-identity and whether the physical relocation is voluntary or not.

A contrasting view argues that as a cognitive construct, place-identity is vague and imprecise (eg Ponti 2005). Taking a broadly discursive psychological approach, an alternative body of work has sought to ‘displace‘ place identity from cognitive structure to discursive process (Dixon and Durrheim 2000; see also Haste in press). That is, the way that people talk about place identity is not taken as reflecting the reality of their cognitive relationships with places, but in terms of the realities constructed and legitimated by language (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). In contrast to the assumption that place-identity (and identity more generally) is a fixed, internally consistent structure, place identity is constituted in social interaction rather than in the mind and enabled and constrained by available ways of talking about people’s relationships to places (Wetherell and Maybin 1996; Widdicombe 1998). Therefore, rather than investigating what place identity is, we should be examining what place identity does (Dixon and Durrheim 2000; Ponti 2005, Wallwork and Dixon 2004). Whichever perspective on place-identity is adopted, the connection between identity and place is of special importance with reference to community engagement and citizenship. Following what has already been written, the next section questions the assumption that community engagement is predicated on a person having some kind of identification with a place or community, based upon a sense of attachment to or affiliation with that place, in light of the way that identity is changing with the growth of CMC. Whilst community may be defined in a number of ways, in this paper ‘local community‘ is defined by a shared physical location roughly equivalent to ‘neighbourhood‘ as distinct from ‘virtual community‘, which is defined by shared interest (see Gaved and Anderson 2006 for a review of community definition). However, there are no hard boundaries; for example, members of online social networks may be defined by a shared physical location (eg Turner and Pinkett 2000).

It is generally assumed that a strong sense of place-identity is a positive thing and benefits both the individual (in terms of nurturing a sense of belonging, purpose and self-esteem) and the community (in terms of active community engagement) (Hay 1998; Low and Altman 1992; Perkins and Long 2002). In the literature, a variety of measures of place-identity have been found to be positively correlated with local community engagement (Brown, Douglas and Brown 2003), engagement in neighbourhood sustainability initiatives (Guardia and Pol 2002; Pol 2002), support for protection of the local landscape (Vorkinn and Riese 2001; Vaske and Kobrin 2001) and behaviours aimed at local water conservation (Bonaiuto, Bilotta, Bonnes, Ceccarelli, Martorelli and Carrus 2008).

Conversely, Lewicka (2005) found that place identification itself did not predict local community engagement, but required local social networks to translate people’s identification with place into civic activity. Foster-Fishman, Cantillon, Pierce and van Egern (2007) also note that a community needs to reach a kind of critical mass of perceptions including an awareness of community problems, community efficacy and local leadership before people will act. It may be that in the studies that did establish a link, a sufficient level of community social capital already existed. Therefore place-identity alone might not be sufficient to ensure community engagement. Identification with place may also be counterproductive according to some studies. Fried (2000) notes that individuals with lower levels of emotional investment in places are socially and economically advantaged because they tend to be more geographically mobile with broader social networks because they are less tied to places. Meanwhile, those who are emotionally invested in a place are effectively ‘localised‘ and socially and economically disadvantaged.

The future of place-identity

Whilst the findings are slightly mixed, they raise some interesting questions. For example, how will technological advances, particularly the growth of CMC influence place-identity and what might this mean for local community engagement and citizenship in the future? As advances in CMC continue apace, the way we think about the concept of identity will undoubtedly change. Bennett (2003) notes the ambivalence with which new understandings of identity have been anticipated; positively, in terms of granting the freedom to creatively fashion multiple identities, and negatively, in terms of the tyranny, insecurity and personal responsibility of reflexive self-determination (see also Giddens, 1991). New forms of identity have been taken as heralding the demise of traditional forms of identity based upon affiliations in physical space, leading to a fragmentation of local community and society. This concern stems from the assumption that online identities are inauthentic because they are disembodied, spatially dislocated and therefore effectively anonymous (Watt, Lea and Spears 2005).

In response to this, it should be noted that in both online and offline communication people ‘manage’ their identities in different ways, enhancing or concealing different parts of their character depending on the social context (Widdicombe 1998). Therefore, to a degree, the dichotomy between online and offline selves is a false one. In the immediate future the capacity for meaningful and emotional expression of self will continue to be limited by the design constraints of specific online networks. Currently, modes of online communication remain heavily text-based; however, this is changing and will continue to change. In the future, online communication will be less text-based and will enable new modes of expression with the development of new audio and visual communication media to ‘flesh out‘ online identities (Watt et al. 2005). Does this mean that people will be more constrained in constructing their online identities? Perhaps not, as recent evidence suggests that online identities may not be as inauthentic as some assert. Robinson (2007) argues that the differentiation of online and offline selves stems from studies of multi-user domains (MUDs) and generalised to all online identities. Conversely, in other forms of online communication people frame their identities in accordance with their offline selves. Moreover, it has been reported that people are sometimes more likely to disclose personal characteristics when online than in face-to-face interaction (Bargh, McKenna and Fitzsimons 2002).

It is likely that in the future place will constitute an important category for grounding identity online. Goodings, Locke and Browne (2007) remark how users of the social networking site MySpace constructed and authenticated their identities through past and shared experience of place, From this they argue that the concept of place is fundamental to identity in all ‘mediated’ communities (communities that are not defined on the basis of shared physical space). Whilst mediated communities are not geographically bounded, a sense of ‘shared locatedness‘ emerges from the interaction of its members to construct a shared identity linked to ‘virtual space‘ that the online community can effectively ‘inhabit‘. An alternative example of this occurs in the phenomenon of cultural diasporas. These are communities in which people may be geographically remote but experience a tangible sense of belonging that is mediated through spatial narratives of shared identity linked to common places. Hampton (2003) explains that the sense of loss experienced by members of online communities is similar to that experienced when a local community is physically relocated (eg Fried 1963).

In addition, some new forms of online social networking sites, such as Facebook, begin from established offline social networks as the basis for community affiliation, in which place (eg school, college or workplace) defines identity and membership (Goodings et al 2007). This is an interesting development as it supports the argument that online social networking sites are likely to be place-focused in the future, both in physical and virtual locations. Moreover, in transcending the virtual, online social networks enhance offline social networks creating the potential to increase social capital in local communities which, as discussed, may be an important precursor to community engagement (in addition to identification with place). Furthermore, Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe (2007) examined the relationship between social networking on Facebook and the formation and maintenance of offline community networks. They found that social networking sites like Facebook integrate online and offline networks, serving to maintain offline social ties. Meanwhile, Gaved and Anderson (2006) note the increasing proximity between online and offline social networks that in the past were viewed as being more exclusive. They go on to argue that place still matters; whilst CMC may liberate people from spatial constraints, leading to the creation of geographically unbounded social networks, it does not reduce the importance of place in terms of their identities and relationships.

The literature on local community responses to risk also underscores the importance of place and identity with reference to the way people frame their perceptions of environmental risks. This is in contrast to the post-modern idea that traditional structures such as the local community were declining in importance (eg Beck 1992; see also Ekberg 2007 and Mythen 2007 for a critique). In perceiving risks, people do not respond passively to external knowledge but engage in meaningful and active interpretation of risk communications and develop their own understandings. This takes place through the lens of local community experience (Horlick-Jones, Sime and Pidgeon 2003). Pidgeon, Henwood, Parkhill, Venables and Simmons (2008) emphasise the importance of understanding risk perceptions grounded in the local social, cultural and political context. Their research on communities living in close proximity to nuclear facilities in England suggests that risks intersect with people’s autobiographical narratives. Local risks were viewed as part of local life and nuclear facilities were broadly supported. Bickerstaff, Simmons and Pidgeon (2006) comment that in researching local community responses to risk, places are treated as simply physical backdrops, which overlooks the meaning-laden nature of risk. In their research into the experience of risk and risk management policies in the 2001 UK Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak, local people’s experience of risk was explicitly spatial in focus and shaped by complex constructions of place and identity. Local people constructed a marginal place identity through which the outbreak and centralised responses to the outbreak were interpreted and understood (eg central government ignoring local knowledge and community interests in a region that was already politically and economically subjugated).

Burningham and Thrush (2004) discuss how perceptions of local air pollution were interpreted in the context of local community life. They explain that rather than perceiving the pollution from the factory as problematic, it was accepted because the consequences of losing the factory, on which community identity and livelihood rested, was perceived as being greater than the air pollution threat (see also Bickerstaff and Walker 2001). Similar approaches have investigated locally and personally significant meanings as a framework for understanding wider perceptions of risk in the context of the meanings of woods and trees (Henwood and Pidgeon 2001; O’Brien 2005). This means that perceptions of risk may be less dependent on the provision of expert knowledge and more informed by local perceptions of community and place. For example, in the context of flood risk, local people sometimes rejected official Environment Agency ‘at risk’ status for their homes when it did not accord with evaluations based on local perceptions and experience (see also Bickerstaff and Walker 2001). Therefore, policymakers must move beyond the idea that local community responses are governed by a lack of information and the reductionist view of risk that fails to take local social, cultural and political context into account (Bickerstaff and Walker 2001).

The future of place-based communities

Further to the dichotomy of online/offline identity, it is likely that the existing distinction between online and offline communities will become less conspicuous in the future. Will this evolution will be to the detriment of existing local communities? The evidence suggests that this will not be the case because new modes of CMC promise to connect people to place as much as liberate them from place. There is a sense, particularly in social psychology that online social networks draw people away from face-to-face interaction and damage local community relations by facilitating modes of communication that transcend physical location (Watt et al, 2005). Some speculate that this will result in the death of local communities, reducing them merely to what Wellman, Quan-Haase, Boase, Chen, Hampton, Diaz and Miyato (2003) refer to as ‘quaint residuals‘.

Wellman, Quan-Haase, Boase, Chen, Hampton, Diaz and Miyata (2006) review a range of studies supporting the idea that communities are evolving in line with the proliferation of networked individualism (NI), which is displacing spatial community networks. This is because new networking devices connect to people rather than places. Wellman et al (2006) use the example of the telephone to illustrate this; whereas telephones would previously have been situated in fixed places for anyone to use, phones are now personal, portable devices. Other technological developments such as wireless internet also facilitate NI. This is leading to a shifting of the structure of community, whereby community networks are now less determined by shared physical location. For examples, communities are increasingly based upon shared interests rather than shared location and community ‘goods‘ (such as social support and information) are conveyed to individuals online rather than in the household or neighbourhood. This means that in the future we will be more likely to come to know our neighbours on the grounds of shared interests rather than on the grounds of shared location (Foth and Adkins 2006). As Foth and Adkins remark, physical proximity cannot be equated to social proximity.

However, despite these predictions, the role of local community relationships is unlikely to simply fade away. Apart from being unrealistic, the idea that one day we may conduct our social relationships almost exclusively online is somewhat depressing. Besides, most scholars would not subscribe to this bleak view of the future. An often overlooked but important point raised by Hampton (2002) criticises the idea that offline communities were constrained by their geography until liberated by the internet as archaic; previous technological developments in communications and transportation, such as the telephone and the steam train have, for a long time, enabled people to connect to social networks beyond their own neighbourhoods without threatening the existence of local communities. Wellman et al (2003) argue that the dichotomy between online and offline communities is a false one; virtual communities are unfavourably compared to an idealised geographically bounded, close-knit local community that never existed. Moreover, the distinction between physical space and cyberspace is also inappropriate because social ties increasingly transcend both spheres (Wellman 2001). It is more likely that rather than damaging the fabric of existing local communities, online communities will actually accentuate their importance and extend and enrich them.

For example, in a series of ongoing studies of ‘Netville‘, an experimental ‘wired‘ local community near Toronto, Wellman et al (2003) observed that those who used the online local community network were more engaged with their neighbours as well as with people more geographically distant. More specifically, users reported no negative impacts on their offline local social networks, had more offline face-to-face contact with their neighbours and wider offline social networks. Such research lends support to the argument that CMC does not necessarily mean the death of traditional place-based communities, but may facilitate engagement within such communities by expanding users’ personal networks, improving communication within the community and building trust and cooperation between members.

In order to gauge the impact of technological change for local communities in the future, it is necessary to look at how communities are currently sustained. As mentioned previously, the sharing of physical space does not of itself automatically lead to identification or affiliation with those with whom that space is shared. Taking a view of community as a process as opposed to structure, community is constructed and sustained through its (re)production in social interaction (see Haste, in press). This means that like online communities, offline communities should not be considered as something that exists independently ‘out there‘, but as a discursive formulation that becomes more or less important depending on the social context. This can be exemplified by looking at studies that report on local community conflict.

In studies of community conflict, the concept of local community takes on a novel significance. Whereas for most of the time people are not mindful of their membership of the local community, when place became threatened in some way campaign leaders mobilised the community as a heterogeneous, consensual entity defined in relation to place. In this context local community serves to galvanise support against a ‘common enemy’ whilst simultaneously masking multiple and sometimes contradictory political interests, goals and demands expressed locally. This has been used as a defence by local people in the context of grassroots campaigns against development at Anahim Lake, British Columbia (Larsen 2008), the proposed expansion of Stansted Airport, near London (Griggs and Howarth 2008) and central government measures to protect the Swedish wolf population (Sjölander-Lindqvist 2008). Community constructions are flexible. For example, they may intentionally construct the local community as marginalised (eg Bickerstaff, Simmons and Pidgeon 2006; Wallwork and Dixon 2004) or as representing common values (eg Della Porta and Piazza 2007). As Burningham (1996) comments, such communities do not reflect actual social divisions, but are socially constructed at different times for different purposes. For this reason, online communities should not automatically be considered inferior to online communities.

The future of citizenship

The final part of this paper considers how anticipated changes to identity and community brought about by technological change might impact upon citizenship in the future. It is argued that whilst more traditional forms of citizenship at the level of the nation-state are likely to give way to multiple forms, citizenship will continue to be located in spaces, whether physical or virtual. Wellman et al (2006) predict that the rise of NI and the ensuing impact on local communities will lead to a ‘fragmentation‘ of citizenship. The result will be multiple, distinct, mobilised citizenships based upon affiliations of individual interest rather than a general commitment to more traditional political values or ideology based upon one’s position in the social structure. They do not intend this to mean that issues concerning place or locality will no longer be of relevance to citizenship. What they do argue is that place will become simply another community of interest, rather than an organising principle of citizenship (as in the nation-state). What this means is that governments will need to radically alter their strategies for promoting non-territorial citizenship initiatives, targeting communities of shared interest rather than shared geography. This will require the development of novel, flexible forms of governance and democracy.

Some place-based citizenship initiatives are successful. Turner and Pinkett (2000), as part of their ‘Creating Community Connections Project‘, took an asset-based approach to local community development and conducted a year-long study in a low-income housing estate in Roxbury, Massachusetts. A local online neighbourhood network was used to map a wide range of local community amenities and services, for example, proving information on local resources including local businesses, associations and social groups. The corpus of information on local amenities and services was then collated online and made available to local residents via the internet either from home or at a local community centre. The aim of this was to create connections within and between people in the local community and to increase awareness of neighbourhood amenities and services, which, it was hoped would improve levels of civic engagement. After one year of the resource being set up, civic awareness amongst users of the resource was found to have significantly increased community social capital.

Bennett (2003b) suggests that many CMC initiatives aimed at encouraging political engagement are directed towards conventional political practices, where radical transformation is least likely to occur. At this level, transformation is likely to be limited to making communication networks more efficient and expansive. However, there is the future potential for transformation in democratic spaces outside the control of government and other established political institutions. This is because decentralised, online networks are beyond the control of political elites and provide a means of publicising an issue to a wide audience at little expense, allowing individuals and communities to compete with established organisations and institutions. Conversely, it is also these very features, celebrated as having potential for future citizenship practices, that give rise to the problems of ensuring effective decision-making and managing the vast range of diverse identities and interests in online network structures (Bennett 2003a)

Pell (2008) also claims that citizenship is being fragmented, though differs from Wellman et al (2006) by arguing that opportunities for civic engagement reside not in virtual spaces, but in new democratic spaces. She critiques the current structure of citizenship, whereby rights and obligations are commonly located at the level of the nation-state. This effectively brackets off opportunities for citizenship in alternative spaces. Therefore, political practices that take place outside of these spatial boundaries are denied legitimacy. However, Pell asserts that new and multiple forms of citizenship are emerging in alternative spaces. Ong (2006) concurs that attention should be directed towards emergent spaces that are fertile for the cultivation of citizenship (see also Dobson 2003).

One or two examples of new places for citizenship practices deserve mention here. Pell (2008) examines alternative locations and practices of citizenship in the context of a tactical housing squat (known as Woodsquat), which aimed to highlight urban homelessness. Pell reflects on how homeless people and their supporters occupied a derelict department store building. In doing so, activists sought to circumvent traditional modes of citizen engagement and engage instead at the level of their local community. Examples such as this indicate a more active form of citizenship, one that is not simply contracted by the state, but claimed by citizens. Pell explains that identifying with the local neighbourhood was as important as identifying as a member of the nation-state, thus raising the importance of physical spaces as places for the emergence of democratic citizenship.

In addition to the emergence of novel forms of identity and place for citizenship practice, new modes of CMC also present potential areas for new kinds of citizenship. Burgess, Foth and Klaebe (2006) explore a number of examples of everyday engagement with CMC media, including online chat, photo-sharing and blogging. They claim that these examples provide a means through which new and alternative practices of citizenship can emerge by creating opportunities for users to engage with online and offline communities and to discuss topics of shared interest or concern. Burgess et al refer to this as a form of ‘electronic democracy‘ that engages with the intricacies and nuances of culture, democracy and citizenship in the public sphere. It also necessitates a shift in the identities of engaged citizens, from receivers of mass forms of top-down, one-way communication, to producers and transmitters of information (Bennett 2003b).Burgess et al propose that CMC and online network media should do more in future to orient their guiding principles in ways that go beyond issues of ownership, content regulation and control, to cultivate technologies and practices that can allow citizenship practices to emerge through informal everyday practices. At present, the formalisation of democratic citizenship practices overlooks the contribution to be gained from alternative identities and spaces in terms of generating innovative methods of citizen engagement. In focusing initiatives in this way, it may be possible to build community networks and promote civic engagement in ways that are more meaningful and important to citizens.

Conclusion

As technological advances gather momentum it seems natural to question how things will change in the future. At the same time, it is difficult to comprehend that things will change. It is difficult to foresee any truly revolutionary impacts for identity, community and citizenship in the future. As a result, the predictions made in this paper are somewhat conservative and unavoidably myopic. Whilst, disappointingly perhaps, averring from making any wildly speculative predictions involving extraterrestrials, robots or global apocalypse, this paper has sought to highlight the continued importance of place with reference to the concepts discussed.

It would seem that a future where identity is dislocated from place is tantamount to a future where identity is relinquished altogether. Current evidence suggests that people will continue to define their identities in relation to places, and there is little reason to suppose that the growth of CMC in the coming decades will alter this; as embodied subjects we are always spatially positioned. Clearly, people value places. Nonetheless, a shift is likely to occur in terms of ‘anchoring’ identities to virtual spaces, which appear to have an emotional resonance akin to physical places. Initiatives aimed at increasing civic engagement are advised to design interventions that strengthen identification with place. This will involve better understanding the diverse meanings that places hold for people. However, whilst being necessary for civic engagement, identification with place is not sufficient. Therefore, interventions must also ensure that communities possess sufficient social capital in order to motivate people into action.

Furthermore, initiatives should be careful not to overlook the increasing importance of the self-determining capacity of people in constructing their own virtual spaces, which are likely to fulfil a similar function as referents for identity. It is unlikely that identification with physical spaces will diminish as virtual spaces flourish. However, it may well be that in time virtual spaces appear to be almost as ‘real’ as a person’s physical surroundings. Strategies for civic engagement will also need to attend to the developing relationship between online and offline community networks. Virtual communities seem set to become more ephemeral and characterised by self-interest and limited to specific forms of action. This makes it more difficult for policymakers to decide where to target their interventions; it is likely that they will be required to gear interventions more towards communities of shared interest rather than shared location. Whilst the barrier between online and offline communities will become more permeable, local communities will continue to be of some relevance, whether as communities of interest or otherwise. For example, representations of local community are still important and will continue to function as a symbol of solidarity for people sharing a geographical location, for example, to rally against development and outsider interests. It is through such processes that community is sustained.

Finally, citizenship appears to be the concept to be most radically transformed by technological and social change. The literature proposes that citizenship in its current form, as a contract of rights and duties between citizen and nation state, will gradually give way to multiple forms of identity, location and citizenship practice that transcend the traditional model. In order to deal with this, governments and institutions must also adopt more flexible and loose approaches to promoting citizenship. Policymakers may choose to look at novel ways of encouraging engagement through the provision of new media tools based around CMC. This could empower and encourage citizens to develop their own informal practices online, rather than using preset formats and agendas. Alternatively, policymakers could consider ways in which to allow citizenship to blossom in physical spaces that transcend the nation-state. For example, planning interventions could think about architectural designs that incorporate novel forms of public space that might encourage the blossoming of citizenship. More work is needed that underlines the significance of place for community engagement. A more complete psychological understanding of people-place relationships is central to this venture, and its importance cannot be overstated.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation. References

Bargh, J. McKenna, K. and Fitzsimons, G. (2002) Can you see the real me? Activation of the “true self” on the internet.” Journal of Social Issues 58 (1), pp33-48.

Bennett, W.L. (2003a) Communicating global activism: strengths and vulnerabilities of networked politics. Information, Communication and Society, 6 (2), pp143-168.

Bennett, W.L. (2003b) New media power: the internet and global activism. In: Couldry, N. and Curran, J. eds. Contesting media power: alternative media in a networked world, pp17-38. New York, Rowman and Littlefield.

Bickerstaff. K., Simmons, P. and Pidgeon, N. (2006) Situating local experience of risk: peripherality, marginality and place identity in the UK foot and mouth disease crisis. Geoforum, 37, pp844-858.

Bickerstaff, K. and Walker, G. (2001) Public understandings of air pollution: the ‘localisation’ of environmental risk. Global Environmental Change, 11, pp133-145.

Bonaiuto, M., Bilotta, E., Bonnes, M., Ceccarelli, M., Martorelli, H. and Carrus, G. (2008) Local identity and the role of individual attitudes in the use of natural resources: the case of water consumption. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38 (4), pp947-967.

Brehm, J.M., Eisenhauer, B.W. and Krannich, R.S. (2006) Community attachments as predictors of local environmental concern: the case for multiple dimensions of attachment. American Behavioral Scientist, 50 (2), pp142-165.

Brown, B.B., Perkins, D. and Brown, G. (2003) Place attachment in a revitalizing neighbourhood: individual and block levels of analysis. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, pp259-271.

Burgess, J., Foth, M. and Klaebe, H. (2006) Everyday Creativity as Civic Engagement: A Cultural Citizenship View of New Media. In Proceedings Communications Policy and Research Forum, Sydney. Available from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00005056/01/5056_1.pdf Accessed 8^th November 2008

Burningham, K. (1996) Us and them: the construction and maintenance of divisions in a planning dispute. In Samson, C. and South, N. eds. The social construction of social policy: methodologies, racism, citizenship and the environment, pp192-209. Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Burningham, K., Fielding, J. and Thrush, D. (2008) “It’ll never happen to me”: understanding public awareness of local flood risk. Disasters, 32 (2), pp216-238.

Burningham, K. and Thrush, D. (2004) Pollution concerns in context: a comparison of local perceptions of the risks associated with living close to a road and a chemical factory. Journal of Risk Research, 7 (2), pp213-232.

Cuba, L. and Hummon, D.M. (1992) A place to call home: identification with dwelling, community, and region. The Sociological Quarterly, 34 (1), pp111-131.

Della Porta, D. and Piazza, G. (2007) Local contention, global framing: the protest campaigns against the TAV in Val di Susa and the bridge on the Messina Straits. Environmental Politics, 16 (5), pp864-882.

Dixon, J. and Durrheim, K. (2000) Displacing place identity: a discursive approach to locating self and other. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, (1), pp27-44.

Dobson, A. (2003) Citizenship. Unpublished paper presented at ESRC Seminar Series on ‘Citizenship and the Environment’, Newcastle, 27^th October 2003.

Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992) Discursive psychology. London, Sage.

Ekberg, M. (2007) The parameters of the risk society: a review and exploration. Current Sociology, 55, pp343-366.

Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, C. and Lampe, C. (2007) The benefits of Facebook “friends”: social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (4), pp148-167.

Foster-Fishman, P.G., Cantillon, D, Pierce, S.J. and van Egern, L.A. (2007) Building an active citizenry: the role of neighbourhood problems, readiness and capacity for change. American Journal of Community Psychology, 39, pp91-106.

Foth, M. and Adkins, B. (2006) A research design to build effective partnerships between city planners, developers, government and urban neighbourhood communities. The Journal of Community Informatics, 2 (2). Available from http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/292/241 Accessed 12^th November 2008

Fried, M. (2000) Continuities and discontinuities of place. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20 (3), pp193-205.

Fried, M. 1966. Grieving for a lost home: psychological costs of relocation. In Wilson, J.Q. ed. Urban renewal: the record and the controversy, pp359-379. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Gaved, M. and Anderson, B. (2006) The impact of local ICT initiatives on social capital and quality of life. Chimera Working Paper Number: 2006-06. Colchester: University of Essex. Available from http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/content/Pubs/wps/CWP-2006-06-Local-ICT-Social-Capital.pdf Accessed 8^th November 2008

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge, Polity.

Giuliani, M.V. (1991) Towards an analysis of mental representations of attachment to the home. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 8, pp133-146.

Goodings, L., Locke, A. and Brown, S.D. (2007) Social networking technology: place and identity in mediated communities. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 17, pp403-476.

Griggs, S. and Howarth, D. (2008) Populism, localism and environmental politics: the logic and rhetoric of the Stop Stansted Expansion Campaign. Planning Theory, 7, pp123-145.

Guardia, J. and Pol, E. (2002). A critical study of theoretical models of sustainability through structural equation systems. Environment and Behavior, 34, pp137-149.

Hampton, K. (2003) Grieving for a lost network: collective action in a wired suburb. The Information Society, 19, pp417-428.

Hampton, K. (2002) Place-based and IT mediated community. Planning Theory and Practice, 3 (2), pp228-231.

Haste, H. (in press) Culture, tools and subjectivity: the (re)construction of self. To appear in Magioglou, T. ed. Culture and political psychology: a societal perspective. Infoage Press.

Henwood, K. and Pidgeon, N. (2001) Talk about woods and trees: threat of urbanization, stability and biodiversity. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21, pp125-147.

Horlick-Jones, T., Sime, J. and Pidgeon, N. (2003) The social dynamics of environmental risk perception. In Pidgeon, N., Kasperson, R. and Slovic, P. eds. The social amplification of risk (p.262-285). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Korpela, K. (1989) Place identity as a product of environmental self-regulation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 9, pp241-256.

Larsen, S.C. (2008) Place making, grassroots organizing and rural protest: a case study of Anaheim Lake, British Columbia. Journal of Rural Studies, 24, pp172-181.

Lewicka, M. (2005) Ways to make people active: the role of place attachment, cultural capital and neighbourhood ties. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25 (4), pp381-395.

Low, S.M. and Altman, I. (1992). Place attachment: a conceptual inquiry. In Altman, I. and Low, S.M. eds. Place Attachment, pp1-12. London, Plenum.

Manzo, L.C. (2003) Beyond house and haven: toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23 (1), pp47-61.

Manzo, L.C. and Perkins, D.D. (2006) Finding common ground: the importance of place attachment to community participation and planning. Journal of Planning Literature, 20 (4), pp335-350.

Mythen, G. (2007) Reappraising the risk society thesis: telescopic sight or myopic vision? Current Sociology, 55, pp793-813.

O’Brien, E.A. (2005) Publics and woodlands in England: well-being, local identity, social learning, conflict and management. Forestry, 78 (4), pp321-336.

Ong, A. (2006) Mutations in citizenship. Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (2-3), pp499-505.

Pell, S. (2008) Making citizenship public: identities, practices and rights at Woodsquat. Citizenship Studies, 12 (2), pp143-156.

Perkins, D.D. and Long, D.A. (2002) Neighborhood sense of community and social capital: a multi-level analysis. In Fisher, A., Sonn, C. and Bishop, B. eds. Psychological sense of community: research, applications and implications, pp291-316 New York, Plenum.

Pidgeon, N, Henwood, K., Parkhill, K., Venables, D. and Simmons, P. (2008) Living with nuclear power in Britain: a mixed-methods study. School of Psychology, University of Cardiff.

Pol, E. (2002). The theoretical background of the city-identity-sustainability network. Environment and Behavior, 34, pp8-25.

Ponti, M. (2005) Methodological issues about the empirical study of place-identity. Paper presented at the 9^th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Available from http://www.idc.ul.ie/place/pdfs/Ponti.pdf Accessed 8^th November 2008

Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and social psychology: beyond attitudes and behaviour. London, Sage.

Proshansky, H.M., Fabian, A.K. and Kaminoff, R. (1983) Place-identity: physical world socialization of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3, pp57-83.

Robinson, L. (2007). The cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age”. New Media and Society 9 (1), pp93-110.

Sjölander-Lindqvist, A. (2008) Local identity, science and politics indivisible: the Swedish wolf controversy deconstructed. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 10 (1), pp71-94.

Tuan, Y. (1977) Space and place: the perspective of experience. London, Edward Arnold.

Turner, N. E. and Pinkett, R. D. (2000). An asset-based approach to community building and community technology. Shaping the Network Society: the Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace, Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing Symposium 2000 (DIAC-2000) May 20-23 Seattle, WA.

Twigger, Ross, C.L. and Uzzell, D.L. (1996) Place and identity processes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 16, pp205-220.

Vaske, J. J., and Kobrin, K. C. (2001). Place attachment and environmentally responsible behavior. Journal of Environmental Education, 32 (4), pp16-21.

Vorkinn, M. and Riese, H. (2001) Environmental concern in a local context: the significance of place attachment. Environment and Behavior, 33 (2), pp249-263.

Wallwork, J. and Dixon, J.A. (2004) Foxes, green fields and Britishness: on the rhetorical construction of place and national identity. British Journal of Social Psychology, 43 (1), pp21-39.

Watt, S.E., Lea, M. and Spears, R. (2005) How social is internet communication? A reappraisal of bandwidth and anonymity effects. In Woolgar, S. ed. Virtual society? Technology, cyberbole, reality, pp61-77. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Wellman, B. (2001) Physical place and cyberplace: the rise of personalized networking. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25 (2), pp227-252.

Wellman, B., Quan-Haase, A., Boase, J., Chen, W., Hampton, K. Diaz, I. and Miyata, K. (2006) The social affordances of the internet for networked individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8, 3. Available from http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120837880/HTMLSTART Accessed Downloaded 10^th November 2008

Wetherell, M. and Maybin, J. (1996). The distributed self: a social constructionist perspective. In Stevens, R. ed. Understanding the self, pp219-280). London, Sage.

Widdicombe, S. (1998). Identity as an analyst’s and as a participant’s resource. In Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. eds. Identities in talk, pp191-206). London, Sage.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

This paper explores how the internet is taken up and used by women in the everyday, how it enters their lives, and how it is integrated into other projects and areas of life. This review is informed by the author’s PhD research, an in-depth examination of a small number of women’s internet use. It inherits some of its approach from that work; internet use is treated as an activity that needs to be viewed in context, considering the rich social world that goes on around it to understand how the internet emerges and is made meaningful through a set of everyday practices.

This paper is not an investigation of gender itself but of how women are making use of the internet, so it will not discuss gender comparison, and will include in its scope reviews of literature that are not specifically about women’s usage, but are suggestive or pertinent to what women are doing with the internet. Women have historically been somewhat excluded from the internet (Wajcman, 2004), although quantitative work tends to find these gaps swiftly closing, the fine detail of women’s use is more constrained (Selwyn, 2006), which requires explanation. The embodied, contextualised approach taken here is proposed in order to understand how gender differences emerge in the practices of the everyday. It is outside the scope of this paper to consider several other social categories of interest. Most notably age is a significant determiner in fluency and access to technology, as well as socio-economic grouping and class (Gorard et al 2003). Nakamura (2002) and Leung (2005) give interesting accounts of intersections of race and gender.

In order to give a flavour of some of the issues that characterise women’s internet use, this paper is focused around three sets of issues. These are intended to highlight the key areas that would benefit from an examination of usage in the everyday. First, the household, looking at how computers and the internet are integrated into the home, including space and home geographies, the relation of internet and computers to other objects and activities there, its relationship to leisure and time, and how the roles women take on in the home translate into their internet use. The discussion then turns to significant others and expertise, which looks particularly at how children and partners impact on women’s use, as well as wider family and friends. This is closely interlinked with expertise and knowledge; how it exists within communities and relationships, and is gained, shared and negotiated. Finally the range of activities for which women use the internet is reviewed, again with reference to how these are integrated into life more generally. Special attention is given to email, as one of the most popular and also most transformative internet applications, and to shopping, an activity that is rapidly becoming more mainstream. Again this discussion will be particularly focussed on how this technology is played out in women’s everyday use. Throughout the paper, plausible and possible futures will be considered, and to conclude, a summary of the discussions and preferable futures will be outlined.

Place in the home

Objects have often been ignored in social research, including the situation of the household and what is done there (Miller, 1987). This has been particularly the case for research about the internet that often focuses on what happens on the screen, or technical developments, treating the online as a disembodied space, quite removed from everyday social forces (Terranova, 2002; Nakamura, 2002). This paper addresses this problem by acknowledging that the internet has material components, requires an engagement with objects, and has consequences for embodiment (Ahmed, 2006; Madden, in press), and therefore investigates how the internet is used in everyday life, and how online applications are integrated into the tasks women do day to day. This section is informed by these issues, and explores how the internet is being incorporated into homes, a space that is already gendered and cross-cut with gendered issues (Ang, 1995; Birdwell-Pleasant and Lawrence-Zuniga, 1999).

Computers and the internet enter a home space that is already full of practices, relationships, values and objects which have a momentum (Birdwell-Pleasant and Lawrence-Zuniga, 1999), where much of this is maintained through women’s work (Riggins, 1994) and the position these technologies come to occupy is one that must be negotiated (Lally, 2002). Becker (2006) uses the term ‘domestication’ to describe how new technologies are taken into everyday life, becoming normalised and losing their exotic qualities. Thus, once the internet is incorporated into the home, it is usually seen in quite mundane settings, and used to further existing project and interests.

Internet as material: objects and space

The internet most commonly enters the home through the object of the computer. An object that must be chosen and purchased, and that has sets of requirements as an object: a suitable space, with facilities for sitting comfortably and typing, sufficient privacy, possibly space for associated objects such as stationary or peripherals like printers, scanners, cameras etc. An inadequately set out computer can cause sore backs and other strains (Leung, 2005). But computers and the internet also transform the spaces and objects around them. For example Morley (2006) argues the television changed notions of domestic architecture, with the invention of the ‘through lounge’ to facilitate viewing. New technology alters how older technology is used, the internet competes with TV, and also transforms what computers are, so they are now largely terminals for the internet (Haddon, 2006).

Many commentators observe that the home, while seen by men and children as a space of leisure, is a space of work for women (Drucker et al 1997; Bakardjeva, 2005; Gray, 1992). So it is worth looking at how the home is laid out in terms of using the internet, and particularly how this layout is already inscribed with gender. It is not uniformly so; homes are divided into work and leisure areas (Bakardjeva, 2005; Ward, 2006), with kitchens and childcare spaces designated for work, while dens, recreation rooms and lounges are designated for pleasure and freedom. Gray (1992) breaks the home down even further; as well as marking rooms as pink or blue with her participants, they mark objects and even parts of objects such as the VCR controls, where most are shared but more complex controls are blue. The placement of the computer within this structure is significant; a computer located in a room where a woman has no regular activity, although she has formal access to it, will probably be rarely used. The computer can also change how rooms are marked, such as a space for homework for both children and the mothers who are tasked to oversee this work (Lally, 2002).

The placement in these spaces marks what kind of machine it is. Computers dominated by men are often sited in purpose-built dens or offices that afford privacy (Bakardjeva, 2005), while those in shared spaces such as dining rooms or dens automatically become shared family property that is difficult to police (Leung, 2005). A common location in a child’s bedroom can prevent women from having access, as the only times of day when they are free of childcare responsibilities, using the computer would disturb the child’s sleep (Lally, 2002).

New developments with laptops becoming increasingly popular, and handheld devices capable of surfing the internet will produce new ways of integrating these machines into the home. These machines no longer require a dedicated space as a desktop computer does, and can be shared among family members and tasks more fluidly. This is particularly meaningful in households that had difficulty finding a suitable space, and for women who had difficulty claiming such a space to set up a computer that could be considered theirs.

As technologies become domesticated, they are constantly evolving, and as technology matures it disperses through rooms in the home. Morley’s (2006) televisions crept into less formal spaces such as bedrooms and kitchens as they became a less revered technology, and it seems internet capable ICTs are doing the same. The impact this will have on women’s usage is more difficult to predict, whether this will mean a reduction of barriers such as computers shut in space marked as belonging to children or men, or losing a stake in shared access to family machines.

Ownership

Purchase of a computer can be a significant household decision associated with a period of negotiation (Lally, 2002). This purchase represents an act of consumption, a move of something from the ‘formal’ economy into the domestic space – where it has the potential to change home practices (Ward, 2006). Despite women’s characterisation as head consumers (Walkerdine, 1997), women typically have less say in such a purchase than men, are less likely to be able to mobilise family finances for their own computer, and more likely to be using cast-offs from the office or friends and family (Leung, 2005). Sorensen (2006) notes that this is also the case with cars and mobile phones where women’s devices are more likely to be a gift, often from others who are upgrading to new models. However ownership is a complex category, and accessing and using a computer must constantly be negotiated among family members once a computer is purchased (Selwyn et al, 2006; Consalvo et al, 2002; Lally, 2002).

Typical reasons for this purchase are a desire not to get left behind by technology particularly for employability (Gorard et al 2004), or for the benefit of children, who are particularly associated with computers (Facer et al, 2003). Parents often fear that they will be selling their children short if they don’t provide a computer (Bakardjieva, 2005), although computers bought under this banner are rarely used for learning activities (Selwyn, 2006). Ofcom’s (2008) figures support this imperative, finding that homes with children are more likely to have internet access, increasing as they age. 78% of homes with children aged 12-15 have access to the internet, compared with 64% of all households.

Costs are constantly reducing. Since Lally’s 2002 study investigating family negotiations about the expenditure of buying a computer, the cost of machines has dropped, and since Gorard et al’s 2003 work, when costs of telephone calls to access the internet were a limiting factor broadband has become the standard way of accessing the internet, with fixed, cheaper costs. However the proliferation of new devices capable of connecting to the internet are always aimed at early adopters, who are in the traditionally privileged groups. Although it is now possible to access the internet for a less prohibitive cost, the most desirable arrangements are always out of reach of many internet users.

Time and leisure

Using the internet is an activity that requires time, and indeed can be very time consuming. This is evident in the blocks of time necessary to gain internet skills or complete tasks (Leung, 2005), and also for aimless surfing, which is often cited as how users familiarise themselves with the technology (Consalvo and Paasonen, 2002). This time has to be found within the patterns of everyday life. Households have many rhythms for timings into which computers and the internet are integrated, such as patterns of work and leisure (Ward 2006), term-times and children’s bedtimes or homework (Lally, 2002), and childcare and meal-times (Ward, 2006).

Women have particular difficulty finding this time (Leung, 2005). Although men and women’s amounts of free-time are often considered to be similar, they are different in quality. Women’s leisure is more fragmented, blurred with paid work in the home (Bittman and Wajcman,1999; Wajcman, 2008), where women are often seen to be never off-duty. This means their leisure time often comes in small chunks interspersed with work activities, so that an activity like watching a whole film is not possible (Gray, 1992).

This lack of time to spend with the internet is typical of the gendering of leisure. With men’s hobbies being time-consuming, representing a space between work and the perils of home life (Cockburn, 1985), and satisfying a need for an intellectually stimulating interlude (Bakardjieva, 2005), women are rarely free, particularly in the home, to have uninterrupted leisure. Indeed, the time women spend with computers is often seen as time taken away from other activities, such as childcare, housework (Miller and Slater, 2000; Selwyn, 2006), or even other leisure activities such as watching TV (Leung, 2005).

Contrast with TV and other objects

As the internet enters homes, it competes and compliments other technologies, such as the TV for entertainment and information, and the telephone for keeping in touch. Computing has been completely transformed by the internet. Ofcom (2008) finds that changes in PC ownership and internet access over time suggest that using the internet is a key motivator for buying a PC. In 2007 64% of households had the internet, 71% had a PC. Although the internet is increasing in popularity, and in 2007 56% of internet users use it everyday, with a further 19% using it several times a week, this still falls behind TV viewing.

The average person watches 3hr 36minutes of TV everyday, with this number having remained constant since 2002 (Ofcom, 2008). Leung’s (2005) research found that using the internet did replace television and other activities for women. But this is not a simple story, as television and the internet can easily be used together. The television is often seen as less effortful than the internet. Watching TV is marked as a leisure activity, while computers and the internet are more associated with work (Ward, 2006). This may in part be about their physicality, as the internet require a comfortable seat and upright posture, which can lead to strains and discomfort, in contrast to watching TV (Leung, 2005).

This association with television and as an entertainment medium is one way to garner a set of predictions for future developments in internet use. Just as TVs become central to family life, and can impact the shape of this with decisions that are made about it – in some families the television is switched on all day and family members move about it, in other homes it is switched on and off when needed (Gray, 1992), families relax together with the television at the end of the day, a situation often overseen and particularly valued by women (Bakardjieva, 2005). It seems plausible that the internet will follow this pattern, becoming an entertainment centre in homes that gathers the family round it.

However, the exact form this technology will take is unclear. A number of devices (TV, films, mobile phones, computers, smaller internet-only devices such as eePCs, consoles, and music systems) are converging. Several of these machines can now take on some of the roles of others. A television represents a dedicated display system, and often also a sound system, but is no longer a unitary device, as it requires peripherals such as a VCR, DVD player, one of a range of set-top boxes for extra channels or functionality and consoles, and can have limited internet connectivity as well as a range of functions beyond showing terrestrial, broadcast television. At the same time, computers connected to the internet can be used to show television, as well as films and music, etc but also added functionality such as making movies and sharing home made films.

Expertise and significant others

Using computers and the internet requires a complex set of skills, and the project of acquiring these skills needs to be seen in terms of people’s everyday life and the social. Gaining expertise can be a substantial achievement; for those who do not have work reasons to learn, it can be very difficult to gain these skills (Bakardjieva and Nakumura, 2002). Formal taught courses are infamous for being an ineffective way to pick up computing skill (Hynes and Rommes, 2006; Selwyn, 2006; Gorard and Selwyn, 2004), and a meaningful everyday interest is required to anchor knowledge. Selwyn et al (2006), in their large scale survey, mapped routes into ICT knowledge, and found the most common were a sustained forced engagement through work or a substantial educational episode, such as a degree program, a specific hobby or interest such as family history, or through family members and communities of practice. This informal learning is deeply personal and tied into users’ own particular circumstances.

Thus internet expertise often relies on a network of warm experts, others who can be relied on informally to support computer use (Bakardjieva, 2005). These are usually family members; particularly for women, they are likely to be partners, children or grandchildren (Selwyn et al, 2005). Such sets of experts are particularly used by women, who are more likely to go to partners or children for help than to value ‘muddling through’ and working out a solution alone, a practice more favoured by men. Women who become experts can be labelled as ‘other’, and while men resist women’s expertise, women often also deny it (Henwood, 2000; Stepeulevage, 2001). This quickness to ask for help is shared with those who are older, in lower SEG groups and with lower qualifications (Gorard et al, 2004).

This labelling of lack of expertise can in turn affect usage. In Jenson, Castell and Bryson’s (2003) intervention in schools, they found that by making girls experts in the classroom, they became more wide users of the technology. This commonly produces a situation where women are considered the least expert user in a household, so that despite having formal access to the internet, and basic skills, mothers/wives may feel little sense of ownership. This reluctance to allow women expertise is common in areas of technical knowledge (Walkerdine 1988). However, here gender intersects with class, as in working class homes where husbands do manual work and wives work in the service sector where computers are common, women can be the dominant experts (Consalvo and Paasonen, 2002). In these cases computer use can become associated with more feminine roles and work, such as childcare and helping with homework.

New internet technology is constantly simplifying and becoming more user-friendly. For example the newest version of the Windows operating system is increasingly intuitive. And we have already seen the prediction that as technology becomes further domesticated it moves from being seen as any technology at all, and as a less problematic part of the home, requiring little expertise.

However, despite a preferable future being one where women are not excluded from ICTs by their association with technical expertise, it seems doubtful that computers and the internet can ever entirely lose this edge of requiring particular expertise. The internet has become the domain of a whole range of experts, and a high status academic discipline (Computer Science), so it will always have some relationship to special knowledge bases.

Motherhood

The roles of wife and mother are played out in relation to technologies, with women’s roles as mother contributing to other ways of engaging with computers (Consalvo and Paasonen, 2002), in guiding and policing children’s use of computers and the internet. Bakardjieva (2005) uses the term ‘internet parenting’ to denote the range of parenting activities required by the internet. This can include ensuring that homework and learning with the computer is done, but also policing the amount of time that is spent online, balancing computer work and play with other activities such as playing outside, guarding against dangers of chat rooms and teenagers running up large bills (Haddon, 2006), or perform intimacy and develop relationships through shared internet activities. This can dominate the engagement women have with computers in the home (Consalvo and Paasonen, 2002), and create everyday tasks such as ensuring the computer is located in a place she can have line of sight while children are using it (Bakardjieva, 2005). Such extra responsibilities associated with computers can result in women strategically maintaining ignorance (Selwyn, 2005), as with Gray’s (1992) participant who remarks that once she learned how to wire a plug, this chore became hers from then on.

The perceived importance of children having access to computers and for general computer literacy (Hynes and Rommes, 2006; Facer et al, 2003) can lead mothers to sacrifice their own use of scarce computer resources to allow them for children, and feel guilt when they do make use of technology (Selwyn et al, 2005), even when the technology is reserved for women’s own use (Leung, 2005). In combination with such self-discipline, studies find partners and children complaining about women’s monopolising of home computers. The only mother in Leung’s study who became skilled at video games was considered a nuisance by other family members and Miller and Slater’s (2000) male participants complained about the expense of their partners’ use, even when the time was spent doing family chores.

What the internet is used for

In contrast to accounts from technologists and the media that emphasise exotic and cutting edge uses of the internet, social research finds that as the internet is incorporated into everyday life, it is used for quite mundane activities (Becker et al, 2006), typically to complete tasks or functions that are quite traditional and not unique to the internet (Gorard et al, 2004). Even the highest users carry out activities that are well integrated into ordinary life and everyday projects. Less active users might only use the internet for one or two activities, such as emailing or as a reference tool, and feel that it fits less easily into their usual ways of doing things, for example preferring to look things up in a book (Selwyn et al, 2005).

When Selwyn et al (2006) surveyed internet users about whether and how often they used 22 different internet activities, most reported using only six of them often. This study found an even smaller number of activities to be generally popular with computer users; these were using emails (38% listed as ‘often’), looking for products and services (29% ‘often’), research for work/business/study (25% ‘often’). The more unusual activities such as listening to music, playing games, online banking, and social activities like messaging or chat rooms had considerably lower scores (around 3-6% of internet users doing them often).

Ofcom’s (2008) figures for 2007 support these proportions; email was by far the most popular activity, with over 80% of internet users doing it. Downloading and researching was done by about 50% of users. General surfing was strongly differentiated between broadband and narrowband users, with 77% of broadband users doing it, in comparison with 59% of narrowband. Similarly with shopping where 66% of broadband users are shopping, but a smaller 47% of narrowband users.

These suggest that despite some stable themes, the profile of internet use is shifting as broadband connections become more common. Concerns about the cost of phone calls which limited Gorard’s (et al 2003) participants’ range of use are falling away. This particularly affects some activities which are passing from the periphery into the mainstream. Online banking was an unusual activity in Selwyn’s (et al 2006) survey, carried out in 2002; approximately 6% of internet users reported using it. But by 2007, Ofcom’s (2008) research shows it is used by 36% of narrowband users and 58% of broadband consumers.

Email

Email is generally considered, by technologists (Okin, 2005), social researchers (Jackson, 2001, Bakardjieva 2005) and regulators (Ofcom, 2008), to be the most popular internet application. It has contributed to making the internet an everyday technology, and often attracts new users to the internet. A particular individual’s email use typifies and characterises their engagement with the internet more than any other application (Jackson, 2001).

Email is particularly associated with women, who favour communication, and are more likely than men to use the internet to maintain relationships and keep in touch (Baym, 2008; Boneva et al, 2001). Similarly Miller and Slater (2000), in their in-depth ethnographic work, describe how emailing relatives had become ‘women’s work’ analogous to keeping up such responsibilities by letter or telephone. This active participation in personal use of emails is in contrast to women’s long reported silence in chat rooms and internet discussions, where they write less than men, and what they do write is less favourably received (for a review see Herring, 2003).

These kinds of uses lead to women reporting an emotional relationship of some kind with computers, the internet and email. Some find the computer begins to feel like a friend, and is incorporated into the identity (Lally, 2002) or stands in for the people they love and communicate with when using it (Whitty and Carr, 2006). But similar feelings can present difficulties in communicating using email. Women miss the extra communicative potential of the body, facial expressions, etc and struggle to replace these in plain text (Leung, 2005).

Email used for these socialising purposes must be seen in the context of traditional methods of communication. In Baym’s (2008) study of keeping in touch across types of relationships (family, friends, acquaintance, etc), about 50% of contact was face-to-face, 25% telephone, and 20% email, with family having a little more telephone and less face-to-face. Different technologies and methods are used seamlessly together, with each used for the purpose that suits it best. Thus telephones are considered better for making arrangements (Haddon, 2006), while email is preferred to phone calls for its cheapness, or to resist long conversations. It is in the balance with other technologies that email seems set to change in the future, as mobile phones become more ubiquitous (Wajcman et al, 2008) and take up a place in the range of technologies women use to communicate, while smaller devices capable of accessing the internet in turn impact on how email fits into life.

In everyday use, email presents a problem of management, particularly in keeping work and personal email separated. These bring new difficulties, such as information coming into the public domain, emails being unreliable as people are swamped (Haddon, 2005). Haddon describes, as do my research participants, elaborate systems of email accounts reserved for work, leisure, transactions that might attract spam, or to give to dating sites (Whitty and Carr, 2006). These can also be managed through time and space, with leisure emails reserved as an early morning or evening activity with a cup of coffee and relaxation (Ward, 2006). These technologies can also be used through others, with some emailers not touching the keyboard themselves, but passing on notes or dictation for others to prepare as emails (Bakardieva, 2005; Selwyn et al 2005).

Email has been consistently a popular technology since the internet was first conceived, with messages sent by engineers quickly morphing into an early form of email, and Bulletin Board Systems, the precursor to the internet in households supplying similar messaging systems. Newly popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook also allow email-like messages, and suppliers of traditional-style email such as Gmail, Google’s email service, are branching out to allow similar related services such as instant messages. Mobile phones and similar devices also allow email to be sent from anywhere. All this operates to disrupt email as a single unitary set of packages and functions. Although it seems likely that email will remain one of the most popular and attractive functions of the internet, the form it takes is constantly shifting, so that its place in everyday practices also shifts, as does its integration with other methods and technologies of communication.

Shopping/consumers

The internet is increasingly associated with consumption and production, eclipsing some of its earlier associations with information and communication (Selwyn 2005). Consalvo and Paasonen (2002) argue that as the internet matures in this way, women have been invited onto the internet by marketing moves, hailing them as consumers. These moves have contributed to current figures, where numbers of women using the internet is equivalent to men. However, women’s internet usage is undermined by their designation as predominantly dumb consumers, while men are positioned as more active, technology literate (van Zoonen, 2001). This represents women as rational and instrumental, in contrast to a more exploratory technical elite of ‘early adopters’ consisting of men (Paasonen, 2002).

Shopping has long been known to be an attractive feature of the internet, and one of the functions that has shaped it as a household technology. Selwyn (2006) found it not only to be one of the most popular activities, but also one of the reasons people give for buying a computer and setting up the internet. It is particularly associated with electrical goods, books and auctions. Ofcom’s (2008) 2007 figures show eBay, the internet auction site, to be by far the most popular website in the UK, with Amazon, the bookseller, close behind. Only large utility sites such as the BBC, google and MSN have comparable figures.

However, until recently more day-to-day purchases have not been effective. Lewis’s (2004) study found grocery shopping problematic, both because the services were patchy and expensive, and many participants had inadequate access to benefit from those services. But in the past five years these sites have developed swiftly, and my own preliminary data suggests they are far more widely used by ordinary consumers, for reasons of both convenience and thrift. Internet shopping requires an in-depth treatment comparable to Miller’s (1998) account of high street shopping, to interrogate not only the brand new innovations in grocery shopping, but also how all online shopping is integrated into everyday life.

Future directions

As we’ve seen, plausible predictions can be made that that most of the key technologies will continue to develop as they are. Laptops and other smaller devices to access the internet will become more common. This will have implications for space in the home, with a dedicated space no longer necessary. Like the television and telephones, multiple devices will become more available for families and spread throughout the home, such as into children’s bedrooms. This could widen access, in that there are less particular requirements for a suitable space, and the same device can be treated differently as it is moved into different positions in the home – a gaming or homework device for children during the day, re-imagined as an adult’s machine for shopping, or communication when they are in bed at night.

Although these devices seem set to become simpler to use, so that some of the requirements for expertise will diminish, it seems unlikely it will become entirely without requirements for special expertise. Similarly with cost, the price of setting up an internet connection will continue to fall, removing some of the barriers of cost, but cutting-edge, well marketed technology will continue to maintain a gap.

The development of hand held devices is unclear. It is likely that there will be convergence in some of these machines: mobiles, TVs, computers for activities such as emailing, watching films, and listening to music. These types of devices seem set to be personal – with each member of a household owning their own. This presents the possibility that women will again be at the bottom of the pile for access to a personal device, in the tradition of the wife-mobile or wife-car, which is a cast-off from others. This might also cut women off from the expertise of partners and children with whom they are currently likely to share a machine.

A more preferable future is one where the internet is as accessible to women and girls as it is to men and boys. This is a difficult problem, as these differences are about sense of ownership both of the objects and the expertise, but also the time to gain such expertise, and the money to invest in both learning and owning the technology, all deeply ingrained problems with links to many other areas of inequality.

The biggest issue seems to be representations of computers and the internet as being men’s area of expertise, with men and boys at school, at home and in the workplace quick to take ownership of technology, as well as finding it easy to establish themselves as local experts. This is not unique to computers, but also true of maths and other technical areas. And it’s clear that, as in many areas of gender inequality, a liberal attitude of fair play is not enough to dent this (Henwood, 2000). What is required is a radical shift in the gendering of expertise, and to how the internet, computers and associated ICTs are represented in relation to this.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press.

Ang, I. (1995) Living Room Wars: rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world. New York, Routledge.

Bakardjeva, M. (2005) Internet Society: The internet in everyday life. London, Sage.

Bakardjieva, M. (2006) Domestication running wild. From the moral economy of the household to the mores of a culture. In: Becker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Baron, N. (2008) See you online: Gender issues in college students use of instant messaging. Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 23 (4), pp397-423.

Baym, N.K., Zhang, Y.B., Kunkel, A., Ledbetter, A. and Lin, M. (2008) Relational quality and media use in interpersonal relationships. New Media and Society. 9 (5), pp735-752.

Becker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. (2006). Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Birdwell-Pheasant, D. and Lawrence-Zuniga, D. (1999) House Life: Space, place and family in Europe. Oxford, Berg.

Bittman, M. and Wajcman, J. (2000).’The Rush Hour: The Character of Leisure Time and Gender Equity.’ Social Forces, 79 (1).

Boneva, B., Kraut, R. and Frohlich, D. (2001) Using Email for Personal Relationship. American Behavioural Scientist. 45 (3), pp530-549.

Bury, R. (2005) Cyberspace of their own: Female fandoms online. New York, Peter Lang.

Cockburn, C. (1983) Brothers: Male dominance and technological change. London, Pluto Press.

Consalvo and Paasonen, S. (2002) Women and everyday uses of the internet: Agency and identity. New York, Peter Lang.

Drucker, T.G. (1997) Time and space in domestic life. In: Drucker, S. and Gary

Gumpert. eds. Voices in the street: Explorations in gender, media and public space. pp43-58. Cresskill, N.J., Hampton Press.

Facer, K., Furlong, J. and Sutherland, R. (2003) Screen play: Children and computing in the home. London, Routledge-Falmer.

Gorard, S. and Selwyn, N. (2003) Learning for @ll? The impact of technology on patterns of participation in lifelong learning. Cardiff, Cardiff School of Social Sciences.

Gorard, S. and Selwyn, N. (2004) How people learn to use computers? Occasional paper, 58. Cardiff, Cardiff School of social Sciences.

Gray, A. (1992) Video playtime: The gendering of a leisure technology. London and New York, Routledge.

Haddon, L. (2005) Managing Email: The UK Experience. Research Report no. 9. Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute; November.

Haddon, L. (2006) Empirical Studies Using the Domestication Framework. In: Becker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Hayles, N.K. (1999) How we became post-human: Virtual bodies in cybernetica. literature, and informatics. London and Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Henwood, F., Plumeridge, S. and Stepulevage, L. (2000) A Tale of Two Cultures? Gender and inequality in computer education. In: Wyatt, S., Henwood, F., Miller, N. and Senker, P. eds. Technology and In/Equality: Questioning the information society. London, Routledge.

Herring, S.C. (2003). Gender and Power in On-Line Communication. In: Holmes, J. and Meyerhoff, M. eds. The Handbook of Language and Gender. Malden, MA, Blackwell. pp202-228.

Hynes and Rommes (2006) ‘Fitting the internet into our lives’: IT courses for disadvantaged users. In: Becker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Jackson, L.A., Ervin, K.S., Gardner, P.D. and Schmitt, N. (2001) Gender and the Internet. Women communicating and men searching. Sex Roles, 44 (5/6).

Jenson, J., de Castell, S. and Bryson, M. (2003) “Girl Talk: Discourses of Gender, Equity and Identity in School Based Computer Culture. Women’s Studies International Forum. 26 (6), pp561-73.

Kendall, L. (2002) Hanging out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and relationships online. London, University of California Press.

Lally, E. (2002) At Home with Computers. Oxford, Berg.

Leung, L. (2005) Virtual Ethnicity: Race, resistance and the world wide web. London: Ashgate.

Lewis, M. (2004) Internet Grocery Shopping. Unpublished MSc thesis. Cardiff University.

Madden, L. (in press) Online Gaming and Embodied Subjectivities: Methods to reach women’s social story of gaming. Human IT, 10 (1).

Miller, D. and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford, Berg.

Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

Miller, D. (1998) A theory of Shopping. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Morley, D. (2006) What’s ‘home’ got to do with it? Contradictory dynamics in the domestication of technology and the dislocation of domesticity. In: Becker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Nakamura, L. (2002) Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet. London, Routledge.

Ofcom (2008) Communications Market Report. London,.

Okin (2005) The internet revolution: The not-for-dummies guide to the history, technology and use of the world wide web. Winter Harbour, Maine, Ironbound Press.

Paasonen, S. (2002) The Woman Question: Addressing women as internet users. In: Fernandez, M., Wilding, F. and Wright, M.M. eds. Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practice. New York, Andromeda.

Riggins, S. (1994) Socialness of things: essays on the socio-semiotics of objects. Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter

Schumacker, P. and Moraha-Martin, J. (2000) Gender, internet and computer attitudes and experience. Computers in Human Behaviour. 17 (1), pp95-110.

Selwyn, N. and Gorard, S. (2002) The information age: Technology, learning and exclusion in Wales. Cardiff, University of Wales Press.

Selwyn, N. Gorard, S. and Furlong (2005) Whose Internet is it Anyway? Exploring adults (non) use of the internet in everyday life. European Journal of Communication, 20, pp5-26.

Selwyn, N; Gorard, S. and Furlong, J. (2006) Adult Learning in the Digital Age: Information technology and the learning society. Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge.

Shade, L. (2002) Gender and Community in the Social Construction of the Internet. New York, Peter Lang.

Sunden, J. (2003) Material virtualities: Approaching online textual embodiment. New York, Peter Lang.

Silverstone, R. (2005) Media, Technology and Everyday Life in Europe. Ashgate

Taylor, T.L. (2006) Play between worlds: exploring online game culture. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press

Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the information age. London, Pluto

van Zoonen, L. (2001), Feminist Internet Studies. Feminist Media Studies, 1 (1).

Wajcman, J. (2004) Technofeminism. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Wajcman, J., Bittman, M., Johnstone, L., Brown, J. and Jones, P. (2008) The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Work/Life Balance: Final survey report. Australian Research Council Linkage Project.

Wajcman, J. (2008) Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time. British Journal of Sociology. 59 (1).

Walkerdine (1988) Mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. London, Routledge.

Walkerdine (1997) Daddy’s Girl: Young girls and popular culture. Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Ward (2006) The Bald Guy Just Ate an Orange: Domestication, work and home. In: Becker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Whitty, M. and Carr, A. (2006) Cyberspace Romance: The psychology of online relationsships. Palgrave

Williams (2006) Virtually Criminal: Crime, deviance and regulation online. London, Routledge.

Wyatt, S., Henwood, F., Miller, N. and Senker, P. (2000) Technology and In/Equality: Questioning the information society. London, Routledge.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

‘The Nintendo Generation’ (Green, Reid and Bigum 2003), ‘The (tech savvy) Next Generation’ (Carlson 2005); ‘Cyberkids’ (Facer and Furlong 2001); Holloway and Valentine 2000) and ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky 2001). All these labels, given to young people in the last decade, make one thing very clear: the current generation of young people is born in a digital world in which they are seen as more at home than their parents, educators and future employers. For the first time in history young people are assumed to be more competent than adults in managing and living with new technologies that have become integral to everyday life (Tapscott, 1998).

Prensky’s (2001) definition of the Digital Native has been picked up by many researchers and educators working with youth, it is a catchy phrase which intuitively reflects the image many have of young people. Especially in the area of education this term has been seen as enlightening because he argues that the environment in which this tech-savvy generation grows up influences not only what they do with their time but also how they think and learn.

“Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work” (p1).

Researchers eagerly cite young people’s intense interaction with a wide number of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), their enthusiasm for new gadgets, and the speed with which they learn to use new applications as evidence for the existence of a new and different generation of people (Hsi, 2007). Implicit in these descriptions is that older generations will not be able to work, think or learn to interact and live with ICTs in the same way as the younger generations. Prensky put the cut off point at 1980. According to him those born before then should be labelled Digital Immigrants. The concept of Digital Native is therefore almost completely linked to age; young people are grouped together by identifying a whole generation as Digital Natives and are expected to be technologically way ahead of anyone born after 1980. Prensky’s Digital Natives would now be around 25 years old. However, ICTs have changed quite a bit since Prensky first coined the term and it is now perhaps more appropriate to speak of first and second generation Digital Natives. In most research the current generation of teenagers are seen as the real Digital Natives. Since they have grown up in a Web 2.0 environment, they could be labelled second generation Digital Natives. This is in contrast to the first generation of Digital Natives (now between 19 and 25 years old) who grew up in an age when ICT interactivity and participatory production were less common.

This definition of the Digital Native as based purely on generational differences has not been challenged extensively. There is research which brings nuance to our understanding of the youngest generation, but this still mostly ignores whether the distinction between young and old is really the most important one to make within the framework of a digital world in which one can be either an immigrant or a native. It seems likely that a person’s skills, their extent of engagement with ICTs, as well as the number of years that a person has been using ICTs are just as important in indicating digital nativity as age (Helsper and Eynon, forthcoming).

Helsper and Eynon (forthcoming) have criticised the notion of the Digital Native as based purely on generational factors. This paper will briefly review these and other critiques of the Digital Natives concept and extends this debate by looking at what (erroneously) labelling young people as Digital Natives does to their perceptions of themselves as ICT users, independent of whether they are in fact more expert than other generations. The paper focuses in particular on the way young people deal with risks and opportunities online and on whether our identification of young people as Digital Natives might lead to adopt certain coping strategies. Conclusions are drawn about what this means for our interpretation of literacy in relation to digital risks and opportunities across different and future generations.

Critiques of the Digital Native concept

Prensky (2001) took a deterministic view about the influence of age on the ability to use ICTs. He says that “Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, digital immigrants.” (p1-2) At first glance young people, on average, do seem all they are said to be; they integrate ICTs into every aspect of their everyday lives and take to new ICTs quickly if access is provided to them, much more so then their parents (Livingstone and Bober, 2005b; Ofcom, 2006).

Researchers working with the term Digital Native have started to question this idea of expertise based on date of birth, as there is enough evidence that real life is a bit more complicated than Prensky proposes. Two arguments have been given against the use of the term Digital Native: (1) it puts young people on one heap and thereby glosses over quite severe inequalities within this generation (eg Facer and Furlong, 2001) and (2) there is enough evidence that young people are not completely comfortable with ICTs such as the internet because they are often unable to avoid or evaluate online risks (Hope Cheong, 2008; Livingstone, 2008).

As an illustration of the first argument two papers merit more attention. In the same year that Prensky coined the term Digital Native Facer and Furlong (2001) wrote an article warning that labelling a whole generation as Cyberkids could have negative consequences. They argued that this term ignored the persistent inequalities within this younger generation in terms of access, skills and attitudes towards technologies. More conclusively, Bennett, Maton and Kervin (2008) reviewed the evidence for the existence of Digital Natives seven years later, and argued that grouping young people together as ICT experts and overlooking inequalities can lead to overconfidence in young people’s skills. The same authors show that “emerging research challenges notions of a homogenous generation with technical expertise and a distinctive learning style. Instead it suggests variations and differences within this population which may be more significant to educators than similarities.” (p781)

In relation to the second critique of the Digital Native, there has been empirical work by Livingstone and colleagues who criticise the notion that young people are, by nature, digitally literate (Livingstone, 2008; Livingstone, Helsper, and Bober, 2008). Livingstone and Helsper (2007) showed clear differences in internet-related skills amongst younger people and also showed that young people who were perceived to be more skilled and those were more active online were also more likely to be exposed to risks. Another paper by Livingstone and Straksund (forthcoming) shows that young people in different countries encounter different types and levels of risks, but that there were no European countries in which this generation was able to avoid negative experiences on the internet completely.

The perception of young people as more ICT expert than adults when they, in actual practice, are not could have negative as well as positive implications in a world where many activities and services are internet and technology based. These implications are not clear and no empirical evidence exists that addresses this issue comprehensively. Nevertheless, it should be possible to deduce some possible effects of this image on young people’s behaviour and the way they perceive themselves by looking at what labelling in other areas of learning does to people.

This paper will address two questions in relation to digital literacy and learning. These two questions are seen as in need of an immediate answer in an environment which perhaps erroneously labels a whole generation as Digital Natives:

• Does openly identifying and addressing young people as Digital Natives prevent them from seeking advice from others who are labelled novices (ie Digital Immigrants)?
• Does this situation mean that young people fail to perceive or deal adequately with risks or hurdles when they come across them because they overestimate their own ability to deal with them?

Some evidence will be presented that suggests which direction the answers to these questions might take. However, current research and evidence does not allow us to answer these questions with confidence and one of the recommendations of this paper is therefore that this issue of young people’s forced identity as expert ICT users and their actual digital skills needs to be further thought through and researched.

Skills, self-efficacy and self-image?

Social psychologists have long studied how others’ views of us influence our identity. The importance of family and peer perceptions is especially important for the way we see ourselves (eg our perceived self) during childhood and adolescence. These perceptions of others might differ from who we would like to be (ideal self) or who we think we really are (true self). Developmental and social psychologists have shown repeatedly that when we hear over and over again that we are ‘bad’ we start living up to this label and start internalising this image of ourselves (Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, 1996; Chen and Bargh, 1997; Goodey, 1997; Link and Phelan, 2001). This relationship between internalising others’ perceptions of the self, which brings perceived self and true self closer together, is undoubtedly also applicable when someone is repeatedly told that they are, on a more positive note, an expert. It would therefore not be a long jump to expect that if young people hear often enough that they are ‘tech-savvy’ or ‘digitally native’ they will grow up with high levels of confidence in their digital skills. In support of this argument, Helsper and Eynon (forthcoming) show that young people have higher levels of confidence independent of their actual levels of experience or expertise. Other research shows that young people in general see older people as less expert (Helsper, 2007) and that parents often think their children are more expert than they are (Livingstone, Helsper and Bober, 2008).

Other research streams show that confidence breeds success, that is, if you believe that you are an expert you are more likely to act like one. Presumed experts are more likely to take risks and learn from their mistakes and through this process advance in the area in which they are the supposed expert. This self-fulfilling prophesy is evident in much of the research on self-efficacy. Bandura has shown over and over again that when people identify themselves as novices they perform badly even when they have the levels of skills required for a certain task (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, and Pastorelli, 1996; Bandura and Locke, 2003). Gender has been a particular focus of studies into the relationship between perceptions of others, self-efficacy and behaviour in relation to educational outcomes. Girls are stereotypically seen as less apt at sciences and at interacting with technologies and this perception causes girls to underestimate their own skills in maths (for a critique see Hackett and Betz, 1989) and interaction with technologies (Broos and Roe, 2006; Busch, 1995; Durndell and Haag, 2002; Hargittai and Shafer, 2006; Imhof, Vollmeyer, and Beyerlein, 2007; Jackson, et al 2001; Joiner et al, 2005, 2007; Li and Kirkup, 2007; Torkzadeh, Chang, and Demirhan, 2006; Vekiri and Chronaki, 2008; Yao, Rice, and Wallis, 2007). The other side of this coin is that boys who are aware of their status as ICT/math experts are likely to perform better and feel more comfortable with technologies than girls with equal skills who are not put on this pedestal (Selwyn, 2007).

It is thus safe to argue that the way in which young people are perceived by others is likely to influence the confidence they have in interacting with technologies. What remains unclear is what happens when the current young generation, labelled Digital Natives, encounter situations which they do not know how to handle (despite their confidence). Cheong (2008) showed that young people frequently encounter computer-related problems such as error messages and not being able to load certain websites or programmes. Young people in particular are likely to try to solve these types of things on their own, more so than older generations.

Problem solving

Figure 1: Getting help for the use of the internet by age

Source: Oxford Internet Surveys: 2007 (Dutton and Helsper, 2007)

Base: All internet Users (N=1578). Weighted to represent UK population.

Note. Differences Significant at p<0.05

The Oxford Internet Surveys (Dutton and Helsper, 2007), for example, show that 80% of young people under the age of 19 work things out for themselves if there is a problem while 70% of internet users older than 55 years old do this (see Figure 1). However, this does not mean that the youngest generation has no one to turn to. Teenagers do rely on family or friends to help them out while 71% of young adults does this; even senior internet users are less likely to turn to their family and friends in times of need than the supposedly tech-savvy generation. These data do not show whether or not it is family or friends who are most relied upon.

The widespread perception of young people as more expert than adults, whether this perception is correct or not, could therefore change the way generational relationships function in society. One consequence, in light of the evidence which shows that young people and their parents perceive themselves to be more expert digital problem solvers than adults even when they are not (Livingstone and Bober, 2005), might be that adults do not realise when young people need their help and young people might be reluctant to ask for help in a situation where they are supposed to know what they are doing (Helsper and Eynon, forthcoming)

Risks?

As pointed out before, there are a number of studies that show that young people’s wide exposure to and general enthusiasm for ICTs does not always equate with an ability to participate safely in the digital world (Buckingham, 2005; Liau, Khoo, and Ang, 2005; Livingstone, 2008; Livingstone and Bober, 2005a; Livingstone and Helsper, 2007; Livingstone, Helsper, and Bober, 2008; Livingstone and Millwood-Hargrave, 2006; Ofcom, 2006). However, we know very little about how young people cope with these more negative aspects of their engagement with technologies. Some of this uncertainty is related to a lack of clarity about what constitutes risky behaviour and which of these behaviours might subsequently cause harm to young people.

Therefore before continuing the discussion about how younger people actually deal with risks it is important to address what is generally meant by digital risks. This paper focuses, like most other research, on the internet while keeping in mind that young people’s lives and identities are shaped through a number of different technologies which include, but are not limited to, the internet.

Recently progress has been made in the area of classifying different types of online risks that young people encounter, but it is still unclear what research and policy should include when talking about actual harm. In a recent very comprehensive review of research into online risks in Europe Hasebrink, Livingstone and Haddon (2008) have classified risks along four dimensions (commercial, aggressive, sexual and values) and with three category types (content, contact and conduct) and related these to the potential harm that might follow from these types of risks. Their classification is replicated in Table 1.

Table 1: A classification of online risks to children

Source: EU Kids Online (Hasebrink et al, 2008)

This review deals with relatively low level, ‘everyday’ negative experiences and not with more infrequent but more severe risks such as grooming by paedophiles. While the severe types of risks are clearly more harmful than these types of everyday experiences, they are also less frequent and therefore less influential in the general online experiences (and perceptions of expertise) of the average Digital Native (Cheong, 2008). A review of the literature shows that low level risks, defined here as activities that may cause technical, emotional or financial, but not physical, harm have been a part of the internet since its early days and are unlikely to disappear even when adults and young people become more expert at navigating the digital world. This definition of risk includes activities initiated by young people that expose them to risks (ie providing personal details, downloading material, posting pictures) as well as activities that young people are subject to without their initiating interactions (ie bullying, technical problems).

Coping

In relation to lower level, everyday negative experiences Livingstone and Helsper (2008) identified four types of risks: violent (eg bullying), pornographic (eg seeing or being sent sexually explicit messages), privacy (eg sharing of personal details) and contact (eg file sharing and communicating with strangers online) risks. While this and other research shows how parents and educators (try to) mediate and regulate young people’s use of ICTs, such as the internet, it is less clear what young people themselves do to protect themselves or to deal with something once it has happened. In relation to everyday offline activities research shows that teenagers take risks in all sorts of behaviour. Often they know they are taking a risk but do not think that the consequences will happen to them (Cohn, MacFarlane, Yanez and Imai, 1995; Trad, 1993). The equivalent in traditional media research is the ‘third person’ effect, which refers to the tendency for people to think that harmful media content has bad influences on (vulnerable) others but not on themselves (Davison, 1983). It is unclear whether the same is true for internet risks; are young people aware of the risks they are taking and if they are, do they consider themselves vulnerable to the negative consequences?

The research that does exist refers almost exclusively to post-hoc strategies, that is, to young people deleting nasty emails or blocking someone after they have sent a negative message. Potentially pro-active and preventative strategies, such as protecting personal information are more often done as part of a ‘fooling friends’ strategy than as part of a ‘protection of privacy’ strategy.

Three behavioural scenarios based on the Digital Native paradigm

Three possible scenarios can be constructed in relation to young people and online risk taking. The first two assume that young people (as experts) avoid risks when on the internet, while the second two assume that young people (even when expert) do encounter risks:

• (1) Young people are experts at avoiding negative or risky experiences because they are native to the digital environment and know how to manoeuvre in it.
• (2) Young people use a ‘predator tactic’, that is they attack the problem with the means available and avoid it happening again. This is different from option (1) in that young people do encounter risks and are not pro-active in avoiding them. Therefore, they have to wait until negative experiences happen and then they deal with them – a post hoc strategy.
• (3) Young people use an ‘ostrich tactic’, that is they look the other way when negative experiences occur (eg quickly deleting an email) and continue as normal after the ‘threat’ has passed. This is different from option (2) in that young people are aware of the risks but judge them to be irrelevant or ‘facts of online life’ and cannot be bothered to prevent them from happening again.

What is important to note is that there is enough evidence to point out that not all young people are experts, and that internet skills differ by gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, income, and education as well as by generation (Helsper and Eynon, forthcoming; Livingstone and Bober, 2005b). Nevertheless, all three scenarios apply whether or not we accept the commonly held assumption that all young people are digital experts. The scenarios were constructed to highlight that young people’s coping strategies might not correspond to Prensky’s original idea of the Digital Native or most adults’ perceptions of expertise. These coping strategies might be a result of labelling of young people as experts when they are not.

Scenario 1 is the wishful thinking that often takes place amongst those who label young people as Digital Natives, that is, young people are so comfortable with the online environment that they only go there where they will have positive experiences and are able to manoeuvre around the negative experiences. Scenarios 2 and 3 are more realistic, based on what we know so far but, especially 3, counter the arguments made about Digital Natives and expertise as proposed earlier.

Scenario 2 assumes that young people are experts with an active approach. They are willing to seek help or to teach others how to deal with risks and are continuously updating their skills to avoid coming across a similar type of harm again. These we could call the self-conscious but confident experts since this type of scenario requires understanding that neither the system nor the user is perfect. There is an awareness that negative experiences are likely to occur again but that it is worth trying to change strategies and behaviours to avoid the same negative thing from reoccurring. This scenario is often the one hope of adults and media literacy educators.

The third scenario corresponds to the predictions made based on the self-fulfilling prophesy framework, that is, the young people who consider themselves experts and are so considered by others take their mistakes and the risks they run for granted. Any negative experiences they see as the fault of the system or of other (stupid) people online and not as the consequence of their own behaviour. This allows them to navigate the online world for a considerable amount of time before something really significant and negative happens. When something happens that they cannot ignore it is difficult for them to ask for help because the image they have built up does not correspond to asking for help from (immigrant) others. So instead they try to ignore the risks and go on living in this imperfect digital world without having to admit to themselves or others that they are sometimes not able to deal with the risks in their ‘native’ land. This last scenario argues that young people are not experts at avoiding risks, but that they are ‘experts’ at living with risks.

Evidence for scenarios 2 or 3 would imply that we have to reconsider how we think about expertise and how we think about talking to young people about risks. The rest of this paper will set out to test which of these images of young people is the most appropriate by looking at how age and expertise influence risk-taking and encountering negative experiences.

Evidence for different scenarios

Evidence can be found that counters the idea that young people know how to avoid negative experiences. The UK Children Go Online Survey (Livingstone and Bober, 2005), The SAFT survey (Straksrud, 2005) and the PEW Internet and American Life (Lenhart, 2007) studies have all shown that young people, especially those who have more experience with the internet, run into more risky situations on the internet. These studies have focussed on young people and therefore are not a representative sample of all (older) internet users in the UK. This makes the comparison between younger and older generations difficult and it is unclear if young (digitally native) people run more or fewer risks than (digitally immigrant) adults. Analysis of the Oxford Internet Survey data (Dutton and Helsper, 2007) shows that age, but more than anything else experience, is important in explaining the number of negative experiences that people have online. Table 2 illustrates how the number of negative situations that people encounter varies by age, skill, years online and the extent of the person’s internet use.

Table 2: Describing the number of negative experiences people encounter on the internet

Source: Oxford Internet Surveys: 2007 (Dutton and Helsper, 2007)

Base: All Internet Users (N=1578). Weighted to represent UK population.

** Differences significant at p<.01

Negative experiences are: Received obscene or abusive e-mails from strangers, Received obscene or abusive e-mails from people you know, Received a virus onto your computer, Bought something which has been misrepresented on a Web site, Had credit card details stolen via use on the internet, Been contacted by someone over the internet from some foreign country, and Been contacted by someone online asking you to provide bank details.

Table 2 shows that the number of risks internet users run into does not differ significantly between those who are first and second generation Digital Natives (14-18 yrs and 19-25 yrs) and Digital Immigrants (26 and older). However, they do increase with self-perceived level of skill in using the internet, the number of years that the person has been using the internet and the number of activities that the person undertakes online. Helsper and Eynon (forthcoming) show that age and years of use are not significantly related in the UK; amongst young people and older people both short term users and long term users can be found.

Figure 2 shows how the different negative experiences are distributed over the different age groups.

Figure 2: Types of different negative experiences by age

Source: Oxford Internet Surveys: 2007 (Dutton and Helsper, 2007)

Base: All Internet Users (N=1578). Weighted to represent UK population.

** Differences significant at p<.01

That risks do not differ by age can also be seen in Figure 2. Only financial risks were more often encountered by the older generation; for all other types of risks there were no significant differences between older and younger generations. The two types of risk, both having to do with people trying to ’steal’ personal financial information, differed significantly between age groups and in this case it was the older persons who were more likely to encounter them. This could suggest that Scenario 1 is valid – young people are indeed Digitally Native, and they are more expert than the older generation in avoiding these types of scams. There is a more plausible explanation: young people are simply less vulnerable to financial deceit. That is, they are less likely to be the target of financial scams since they, in general, do not have access to credit cards or enough funds to be of interest to financial scammers. This is supported by the fact that other contact and technical types of harm are just as likely to occur in young as in older internet users.

To understand which factors are more important in explaining people’s negative experiences online linear regression can be used (see Table 3).

Table 3: Explaining the number of negative experiences people encounter on the internet

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

Table 3 shows that when all variables are controlled for, age does influence the number of risks people run, younger people are less likely to encounter risks. This counters some of the moral panics that exist around young people and online negative experiences, as older people are more likely to encounter these. The definition of Digital Natives purely in terms of age seems misguided since experience and the extent of immersion in the internet (breadth of use) are even more important. From these analyses we can deduce that for every 10 years of using the internet about one negative online experience is added. For every 10 activities added, about half a negative experience is added. This seems to support Scenario 1 where young people avoid some risks that older people run into.

Livingstone and Helsper (2008) as well as Liau, Khoo and Ang (2005) argue that risks are the flipside of opportunities and that those children who are more eager to take up the opportunities that the internet offers are also more likely to encounter what adults would label risks. Indeed the analyses above show that for both Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants being an intense user is related to more negative experiences. This suggests that scenarios 2 and 3 might also be valid for internet users, no matter which generation they belong to, but expert and intense internet users are likely to encounter more risks than novices. Where Digital Natives might differ from Digital Immigrants is in how they deal with these negative experiences.

Coping with negative experiences

The previous section of this paper addressed how online negative experiences are related to generation, but also to experience and immersion in the technology. This does not say anything about how young people deal with negative experiences when they encounter them. As shown before, while there is some evidence that young people avoid certain types of negative experiences, it is not clear what their general strategy is in dealing with them, and therefore it is unclear whether, as Digital Natives, young people take up responsibility and use ‘predator’ tactics or whether they ignore risks using ‘ostrich’ tactics.

Table 4: Dealing with negative experience by age

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

All differences significant at p<.01

^a Considered evidence of Ostrich Tactic

^b Considered evidence of Predator Tactic

Table 4 suggests that the ‘ostrich’ tactic is more prevalent in the young than in the older generations when it comes to dealing with spam and Virus messages. They are more likely not to be bothered by spam messages although they do say they receive them. They are also proportionally more likely to say they are either not concerned or concerned about unpleasant experiences but have not done anything to deal with these experiences when using email. It is especially the second generation Digital Natives (ie teenagers) who are more likely than other generations to use this Ostrich tactic (see Table 5).

Table 5: Explaining spam ostrich tactics (‘not bothered by spam’)

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

Table 5 shows that generation and especially second generation Digital Nativeness (ie 14-18 year olds) significantly explains whether people use Ostrich tactics to deal with spam or unwanted email. Teenagers were twice as likely as those over 26 years old to use this tactic even when online experience and expertise were controlled for. In fact the distinction between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants was the only one factor that significantly explained the use of the Ostrich tactic.

Table 6: Explaining Ostrich tactics as regards unpleasant email experiences (‘Haven’t done anything’)

Source: OxIS 2007 Internet users (N=1,578)

Table 6 contradicts the findings for SPAM because age is here not a significant explanatory factor. However, self-perceived skill is. Surprisingly, the more confident the person is in their skills the less likely they are to take the Ostrich tactic in dealing with negative emails. Here the Digital Nativeness is not determined by generation but by expertise.

Straksrud and Livingstone (forthcoming) showed that the Ostrich tactic is also more common in young people as regards social interactions (ie. contact risks). Young people are most likely to just delete messages when they do not like them, ignored certain sexual or violent content, or said they did not much think about it. They call this strategy ‘neutral’ because it does not require action on the side of the user.

There is thus some evidence for the high use of an ‘Ostrich tactic’ by the Digital Native as defined by generation in comparison to Digital Immigrants (Scenario 3). There is more support for this argument than for the argument that young people are so expert that they can avoid risks (Scenario 1) or that they deal with risks when they encounter them (Scenario 2 – predator tactics).

Discussion

This paper proposed that the labelling of young people as Digital Natives might have unexpected consequences. It was argued that this label might make them perceive themselves as more competent than they really are, therefore more willing to take risks and more likely to acquire skills rapidly. This has to be seen in comparison to the Digital Immigrants who would have lower internet self-efficacy levels and might consequently be more likely to admit they do not know something and ask for help, but they might also underestimate their own skill. The consequences of young people adapting their identity to the general perception that exists of them for problem solving in relation to the internet are still unclear. The paper asked if this label of Digital Natives makes young people less likely to ask for help and whether it makes them less likely to be aware of the risks they are taking online. Reviewing the findings from UK studies, the Oxford Internet Surveys in particular, this paper showed that young people are indeed more likely to try and sort things out on their own and not ask for help, although second generation Digital Natives (teenagers) were slightly more likely to seek help from others than the first generation of Digital Natives (young adults). The paper also argued that young people, while perhaps encountering fewer risks, are by no means able to avoid negative online experiences. They might encounter fewer risks because many of the privacy-related risks are more relevant to older generations who have financial concerns, such as credit card fraud and identity theft to worry about. It is therefore not the case that the young people are able to avoid these types of risks, but instead they simply do not come across these situations because they are not part of their digital world. It seems Digital Natives are just as likely to encounter other conduct, content and related risks as older users with the same level of skill and experience.

Three scenarios were proposed based on the Digital Native paradigm that would predict how young people deal with risks, the first – expert avoidance – paradigm is rejected based on the fact that young people were not able to completely avoid risks and did seem aware of them. The second – predator – scenario was not really supported since young people were not more likely than other groups to actually deal with a negative situation to make sure that it did not happen again. Instead the third – Ostrich tactic – scenario seems more plausible. Young people were likely to either ignore the risks when they came along or to take a passive action which was unlikely to prevent the same negative experience from happening again. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that while generation might explain how people cope with negative online experiences, it is not clear that it is the most important influence on the number of negative experiences or risks encountered. Experience and expertise are more significant predictors of the latter than generation. Prensky’s original concept of a generation of Digital Natives, here measured as the skills to avoid risks, was thus not supported. Instead the difference between generations might be in how they cope with negative experiences when encountered, but not clearly in a way that shows young people as employing more advanced coping strategies.

This overview of research and existing data could not determine if young people’s ‘Ostrich style’ coping strategies were caused by young people not wanting to admit that there are situations online that they are not able or do not want to deal with because they are supposed to be Digital Natives. One conclusion is that Digital Natives see Digital Immigrants as incapable of helping in the digital world where young people are considered to be native, but evidence is needed to support this claim. There was a hint that the future might be different: first generation Digital Natives were less likely to rely on others than digital migrants, but second generation Digital Natives seem not to have ‘inherited’ this refusal to seek others’ support. They mostly seek support from their peers, however, or try to figure it out themselves.

Conclusions

Young people tend to use a tactic that is passive when it comes to dealing with negative experiences online. They seem to stick their heads in the sand and wait for the negative experience to pass and then continue as before. This was labelled the Ostrich tactic in this paper. This type of reaction could be influenced by older generations placing them in the role of Digital Natives even when not all young people fulfilled the requirements of expertise. It is imperative that the image of the latest generation as ‘Digital Natives’ does not distract educators and parents from understanding the complex issues that lie beneath young people’s everyday interaction with ICTs. Young people should be given room to fail and should develop trusted relationships in which they can admit that they are not able to do everything perfectly when it comes to the digital world.

Adults need to make sure that their perception of young people as digital experts does not make them blind to the fact that ICTs often represent everyday offline life for these young people with all its highs and lows. I propose that (a) risks are part of everyday life and of learning experiences, and that (b) cutting young people off from ICTs denies them the learning, social, and emotional opportunities that these offer. Educators need to understand that there is no such thing as riskless ICT use and ways need to found to help young people develop active instead of passive ‘Ostrich’ tactic styles of coping with the negative aspects of digital living. In most cases experiences of what Prensky called Digital Immigrants are not that far removed from those of Digital Natives and parallels can be found with the commercial, aggressive, sexual and value risks (see Hasebrink et al, 2008) that previous generations have run in offline life.

It should be stressed that this paper by no means implies that young people are stupid (ie they do not see any risks) or that they completely lack the skills to deal with problems. Perhaps an alternative explanation is that they honestly do not care as much as adults about these everyday nuisances in using technologies and that, in this sense, they are different from adults. Perhaps adults are immigrants in the sense that the digital world is still separate to them from ‘real life’. They have different criteria and different strategies for the online and the offline worlds. Young people might accept digital experiences as part of every day life online, as part of who they are, and negative experiences do not influence their functioning to the extent that they might for those who are not Digital Natives. Young people will be able to use their varying skills to avoid embarrassing or negative experiences in those areas which truly matter to them, especially in relation to their peers but not in relation to other privacy, social, technical, financial or other ‘glitches of the system’.

Young people perhaps see these risks as unavoidable if they want to take up the benefits of online life. Just as most young people will not stay locked up inside because there are careless drivers or potential bullies outside, they will not stay off the internet because they might receive annoying messages or receive a computer virus. While they perceive risks as part of everyday online and offline life, adults still see these two arenas as separate and assume that young people are better at navigating the online than the offline. The ideal situation would be if young people can adopt what was, in this paper, called the predator tactic, that is, face the negative experience and try to avoid it in the future by using the tools available to them. A completely risky and harmful online world is an illusion that might have been perpetuated by the image of young people as Digital Natives: instead of steering young people away from risks it might have led them to take a passive approach where problems are encountered but not faced or dealt with. A preferable future scenario would be a realistic evaluation of which negative experiences are most likely to bother young people in their everyday interactions with the technologies and accept that they are fallible while handing them to tools to deal with these types of situations. In other words, use a similar technique to how we teach young people to cross the road… not by keeping them inside but by allowing them incremental further steps, and perhaps a few close encounters, to really appreciate the risks while at the same time teaching them about the warning signs.

The futures

This paper was written for the Beyond Current Horizons programme which stimulated the imagining of possible future scenarios with a special focus on educational futures. To end this paper three scenarios based on the topic under discussion in this paper which can be divided into plausible, possible and preferable scenarios will be discussed.

The plausible

It is likely that the integration of interactive technologies into our everyday lives will continue. The internet, on a myriad of different platforms, will become an even more integral part of everyday life. I would even go so far as to say that it will become so ubiquitous and integrated that people will not consciously separate it from the fabric of society. The internet and associated technologies will thus become invisible. From the material presented in this paper it seems that in this type of society the current generations are indeed ‘Digitally Native’. While there might still differences in (quality of) access, skills and types of engagement with ICTs amongst young people, they do not seem to see the digital world as separate from ‘real life’, at least not to the extent that adult Digital Immigrants do. This would mean that instead of ignoring or being afraid of interacting with their own children in digital environments as the current generation of adults are supposed to be, the generation of Digital Natives will be comfortable with facing the reality of the digital world as part of their children’s everyday life. The current generation should therefore be equipped, perhaps through educational institutions, with the tool kit that allows them to talk to their children about the risks and opportunities that occur online. Most young people will already have the vocabulary to do this. So as long as current generations of adults (ie digital migrants) accept that young people are not completely tech-savvy and that the experiences of adults in the offline world have their parallels in the online world adults and young people should be able to strike up a constructive conversation in this area. Thus if we move away from the (erroneous) perception of unbridgeable chasms between generations and if we instead focus on the importance of expertise and literacy which can be learned independent of age, this scenario is indeed plausible.

This scenario also means a shift to an education in digital literacy that focuses on critical literacy instead of technical literacy. It focuses on dealing with general situations that might occur in a digital world and not with specific applications. Many of these critical skills have been passed on by parents and teachers over the centuries in an offline context and a mutual discussion and understanding is necessary so that young people feel that it is okay to ask for help even if the adults do not have the specific technical experience. In a way a dictionary which translate the offline to the online and back again, where parallels are drawn between the past and the future, is needed.

The possible

It is possible that the internet and technologies will change so much that the current generation of Digital Natives become the Digital Immigrants of the future. This scenario assumes that Prensky’s ideas of an evolutionary development of the brain based on drastic changes in the environment are correct and that humans are fundamentally and irreversibly changing. This would mean a continuing disconnect between generations and a continuation of the mistaken perception that young people and older people cannot communicate or learn from each other about interactions with ICTs. This is a scenario which could lead to what Selwyn (2008) labelled the ‘death of schools’ scenario. Those in favour of this perspective (Rowan and Bigum, 2003; Tapscott, 1999; Underwood, 2007) say young people are so disconnected and teaching styles so alienating that schools become obsolete as learning environments. One possibility is that while the physical school might continue to exist it no longer serves as the seat of power for teaching, that is, educators will take on a different role. They will serve as conduits or guides for young people to link up with experts around the world who do speak the language of the Digital Natives of that time and understand the risks and opportunities out there. Teachers might not teach anymore, they might just become supervisors of personalised learning by students from different backgrounds who come into the physical school building to then reach out to different areas and experts around the world. Peer-to-peer learning will be an important part of this system where young people learn from others’ experiences who have grown up in the digital world, that is, trial and error learning in those areas where adults cannot be of any help. Teachers will be present to help young people learn and answer basic questions, but the real learning will take place amongst the students who are attending courses by world-wide experts through links with others outside the classroom. Schools are still necessary in this scenario to ensure that young people participate in these world-wide curricula.

The preferable

The preferable future would clearly lie in a world where socio-economic status, education and other factors related to offline inequalities were not replicated in the digital world; a world in which all have equal access, skills and opportunities to use technologies to improve their quality of life, a world in which generation and gender do not put a wedge in between people’s abilities to deal with technologies; a world in which experience and expertise are really the most important aspects of adopting active tactics of dealing with negative online experiences would mean that adults with dedication can catch up and help young people deal with issues as educators and teachers again.

I hope that it is clear from the above that I am optimistic, my preferred and plausible scenarios are not that far removed from each other, at least not when it comes to generation gaps. Nevertheless, I do believe that social/socio-economic inequalities in the ability to access high quality ICTs and in the skills people have to get the most out of ICTs while avoiding the risks associated, will continue to exist although in an ideal or preferred world they would have to disappear.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

References

Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Caprara, G.V. and Pastorelli, C. (1996) Multifaceted impact of self-efficacy beliefs on academic functioning. Child development, 67 (3), pp1206-1222.

Bandura, A. and Locke, E.A. (2003) Negative self-efficacy and goal effects revisited. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88 (1), pp87-99.

Bargh, J.A., Chen, M. and Burrows, L. (1996) Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71 (2), pp230-244.

Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L. (2008) The ‘Digital Natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39 (5), pp775-786.

Broos, A. and Roe, K. (2006) The digital divide in the playstation generation: Self-efficacy, locus of control and ICT adoption among adolescents. Poetics, 34 (4-5), pp306-317.

Buckingham, D. (2005) The media literacy of children and young people. A review of the research literature. London, OFCOM.

Busch, T. (1995) Gender Differences in Self-Efficacy and Attitudes toward Computers. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 12 (2), pp147-158.

Chen, M. and Bargh, J.A. (1997) Nonconscious behavioral confirmation processes: The self- fulfilling consequences of automatic stereotype activation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33 (5), pp541-560.

Cheong, P.H. (2008) The young and techless? Investigating Internet use and problem-solving behaviors of young adults in Singapore. New Media and Society, 10 (5), pp771-801.

Cohn, L.D., Macfarlane, S., Yanez, C. and Imai, W.K. (1995) Risk-perception: Differences between adolescents and adults. Health Psychology,14 (3), pp217-222.

Davison, W.P. (1983). The third-person effect in communication. Public Opinion Quarterly, 47 (1), pp1-15.

Durndell, A., and Haag, Z. (2002) Computer self efficacy, computer anxiety, attitudes towards the Internet and reported experience with the Internet, by gender, in an East European sample. Computers in Human Behavior, 18 (5), pp521-536.

Dutton, W. and Helsper, E.J. (2007) The Internet in Britain: 2007. Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Facer, K. and Furlong, R. (2001) Beyond the Myth of the ‘Cyberkid’: Young People at the Margins of the Information Revolution. Journal of Youth Studies, 4 (4), pp451-469.

Goodey, J. (1997) Boys don’t cry – Masculinities, fear of crime and fearlessness. British Journal of Criminology, 37 (3), pp401-418.

Green, B., Reid, J. and Bigum, C. (2003) Teaching the Nintendo generation: Children, computer culture and popular technologies. In: Howard, S. ed., Wired-up: Young People and the Electronic Media, pp19-42. London, Routledge.

Hackett, G. and Betz, N.E. (1989) An Exploration of the Mathematics Self-Efficacy/Mathematics Performance Correspondence. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 20 (3), pp261-273.

Hargittai, E. and Shafer, S. (2006) Differences in actual and perceived online skills: The role of gender. Social Science Quarterly, 87 (2), pp432-448.

Hasebrink, U., Livingstone, S. and Haddon, L. (2008) Comparing children’s online opportunities and risks across Europe: Cross-national comparisons for EU Kids Online. EU Kids Online Deliverable D3.2 for the EC Safer Internet plus programme. London, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Helsper, E.J. (forthcoming) Gendered internet use across generation and lifestages. Under revision at Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

Helsper, E.J. (2008) Digital Inclusion: An Analysis of Social Disadvantage and the Information Society. London, Department of Communities and Local Government.

Helsper, E.J. (2007) Internet use by vulnerable teenagers: Social inclusion, self-confidence and group identity. Unpublished PhD thesis. London, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Helsper, E.J. and Eynon, R. (forthcoming) Digital Natives: Where is the evidence?

Hope Cheong, P. (2008) The young and techless? Investigating Internet use and problem-solving behaviors of young adults in Singapore. New Media and Society, 10 (5), pp771-801.

Hsi, S. (2007) Conceptualizing learning from the everyday activities of digital kids. International Journal of Science Education, 29 (12), pp1509-1529.

Imhof, M., Vollmeyer, R. and Beierlein, C. (2007) Computer use and the gender gap: The issue of access, use, motivation, and performance. Computers in Human Behavior, 23 (6), pp2823-2837.

Jackson, L.A., Ervin, K.S., Gardner, P.D. and Schmitt, N. (2001) Gender and the Internet: Women communicating and men searching. Sex Roles, 44 (5-6), pp363-379.

Joiner, R., Brosnan, M., Duffield, J., Gavin, J. and Maras, P. (2007) The relationship between Internet identification, Internet anxiety and Internet use. Computers in Human Behavior, 23 (3), pp1408-1420.

Joiner, R., Gavin, J., Duffield, J., Brosnan, M., Crook, C., Durndell, A. et al. (2005) Gender, Internet identification, and Internet anxiety: Correlates of Internet use. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 8 (4), pp371-378.

Lenhart, A. (2007) Cyberbullying and Online Teens: Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Li, N. and Kirkup, G. (2007) Gender and cultural differences in Internet use: A study of China and the UK. Computers and Education, 48 (2), pp301-317.

Liau, A.K., Khoo, A. and Ang, P.H. (2005) Factors influencing adolescents engagement in risky Internet behavior. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 8 (6), pp513-520.

Link, B.G. and Phelan, J.C. (2001) Conceptualizing stigma. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, pp363-385.

Livingstone, S. (2008) Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. New Media and Society, 10 (3), pp393-411.

Livingstone, S. and Bober, M. (2005a) Taking online opportunities? Children’s uses of the Internet for education, communication and participation. E-Learning, 1 (3), pp395-419.

Livingstone, S. and Bober, M. (2005b) UK children go online: Final report of key project findings. London, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Livingstone, S. and Helsper, E.J. (2007) Taking risks when communicating on the Internet: The role of offline social-psychological factors in young people’s vulnerability to online risks. Information, Communication and Society, 10 (5), pp619 – 644.

Livingstone, S., Helsper, E.J. and Bober, M. (2008) Balancing opportunities and risks in teenagers’ use of the Internet: The role of online skills and family context. Information, Communication and Society, forthcoming.

Livingstone, S. and Millwood-Hargrave, A. (2006) Harm and Offence in Media Content. A review of the evidence. Bristol, Intellect Press.

Ofcom. (2006). Media Literacy Audit: Report on media literacy amongst children. London, Ofcom.

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9 (5).

Rowan, L. and Bigum, C. (2003) Actor network theory and the study of online learning. New perspectives on quality. In: Davies, G. and Stacey, E. eds. Quality Education @ a Distance. Norwell, MA, Kluwer Academic.

Selwyn, N. (2007) Hi-tech = guy-tech? An exploration of undergraduate students’ gendered perceptions of information and communication technologies. Sex Roles, 56 (7-8), 525-536.

Straksrud, E. (2005) SAFT Project Final Report. Available from http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/sip/projects/awareness/closed_projects/saft/index_en.htm.

Staksrud, E. and Livingstone, S. (forthcoming) Children and online risk: Powerless victims or resourceful participants? Information, Communication and Society.

Tapscott, D. (1999) Educating the Net Generation. Educational Leadership, 56 (5), pp6-11.

Tapscott, D. (1998) Growing up digital: The rise of net generation. New York, McGraw-Hill.

Torkzadeh, G., Chang, J.C.J. and Demirhan, D. (2006) A contingency model of computer and Internet self-efficacy. Information and Management, 43 (4), pp541-550.

Trad, P.V. (1993) The ability of adolescents to predict future outcome. Part I: Assessing predictive abilities. Adolescence, 28 (111), pp533-555.

Underwood, J.D.M. (2007) Learning through digital technologies. BJEP Monograph Series II, Number 5, 1 (1), pp1-9.

Vekiri, I. and Chronaki, A. (2008) Gender issues in technology use: Perceived social support, computer self-efficacy and value beliefs, and computer use beyond school. Computers and Education, 51 (3), pp1392-1404.

Yao, M.Z., Rice, R.E. and Wallis, K. (2007) Predicting user concerns about online privacy. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58 (5), pp710-722.

This scenario is likely both in case of an energy crisis and in the absence of one. The internet and the world wide web might be the only way to continue conducting global business when raw materials such as oil and gas run out or become prohibitively costly.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.