The adoption of the mobile web and social media by African American and Latino teens has been decisive and also turns the theories about the digital divide and diffusion of innovation on their heads.
No one would have predicted that black and Latino youth would be trendsetters when it came to the early adoption of the mobile Internet. No one would have predicted that by the close of the first decade of the new millennium black and Latino teens would be spending more time online than their white and Asian American counterparts.28 But their reasons for the adoption of the mobile Internet are complex. Their use of mobile platforms, especially smartphones, suggests early adopter status, on the one hand, while also illuminating the lack of reliable access to home broadband connections, on the other. In chapter two we refer to this as the “mobile paradox.”
Black and Latino youth are extraordinarily active when it comes to using their mobile phones to connect with peers, play games, listen to music, and watch videos.29 Still, very little is known about the creative and media production practices that are also a part of their social and media ecologies. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad to the world in 2010, he repeatedly stated that the tablet “was like holding the Internet in your hand.” Our fieldwork suggests that black and Latino teens had already been holding the Internet in their hands via mobile phones. Throughout this book we consider two questions. First, what kind of Internet are black and Latino teens holding? Second, what are the social and educational implications of the Internet they hold? Researchers must develop a sharper portrait of the rapidly evolving media ecologies of black and Latino teens to learn what, if anything, is distinct about their use of media and Internet technologies.
Some of the more interesting questions regarding the media practices of black and Latino teens are sociological. How is their media ecology evolving with the adoption of social and mobile platforms? How does their embrace of the mobile phone as the hub of their social, informational, and cultural life rewrite the digital divide narrative? What distinct skills, assets, and dispositions do they bring to their adoption of smart technologies? Likewise, how does their adoption of mobile reproduce concerns about digital access, participation, and literacy that have been long-standing themes in the digital divide narrative? What are the social, educational, and civic implications of their engagement with media technologies? We address these and other questions in the following pages.
Black and Latino teens go online often and from a variety of places—school, libraries, community tech centers, home, and via mobile devices. Their adoption of media technologies has provoked some researchers to shift from studying the “access gap” to studying what is characterized as the “participation gap” or “digital literacy gap.”30 This shift acknowledges that as more diverse populations join the digital world, analysts must delineate the different environments, genres of use, and skills that produce diverse media environments, practices, and modes of participation in digital media culture.
Many of the chapters in the book illuminate how the technology practices of black and Latino teens are remaking the digital divide. Thus, rather than frame their use of digital media in the context of deficits, we frame their media behaviors in the context of assets, too. In other words, rather than thinking only about what black and Latino teens lack when engaged in the digital world, we also consider what they bring to their engagement. Importantly, the chapters also consider how social and economic inequalities continue to influence the digital practices and educational opportunities of African American and Latino teens even as their participation in the digital world expands.
As knowledge about the multifaceted aspects of digital inequality (i.e., access gaps, participation gaps, literacy gaps) continues to evolve, research and policy interventions must also evolve. We view the digital divide as not simply a matter of access to technology but also access to the social, human, and learning resources that support more capital-enhancing modes of adoption and participation.31 Moreover, we maintain that schools and other youth-serving entities invested in preparing young people for the world of tomorrow must help them develop the skills and the disposition to use technology to intervene in the world around them. Access to technology, we argue, is no longer a sufficient measure of success, better learning futures, or digital equity. Rather, those on the ground—parents, educators—or designing policy to enrich the lives of young people must seek to create spaces, resources, and learning opportunities that empower young people to participate in the making of new social, civic, and economic futures.
Much of the debate about technology in the education of teens in the digital edge pivots around workforce development or preparing them for jobs that are steadily being erased by automation and globalization. The career-ready discourse, as we discuss in the conclusion, misses the critical opportunity to design schools and curricula that prepare students for a society and economy marked by complexity, uncertainty, and diversity. As a result of our fieldwork at Freeway, we pose a different challenge: rather than preparing students for today’s jobs (career readiness), why not support their preparation for the social, civic, and economic uncertainties of tomorrow (future readiness).
The three factors noted above—the new geography of inequality, the resegregation of school and learning, and shifts in the digital divide—contribute in unique ways to the making of the digital edge and the prospects for opportunity and mobility among Freeway students. Schools do not live in a vacuum. In fact, schools are a prominent reflection of society’s racial formations and social and economic inequalities.32 As we began to analyze the data from our fieldwork, we found ourselves striving to understand how the social and economic currents that were happening outside the walls of Freeway influenced what we observed inside the school.
Doing School in the Digital Edge
The demographic and academic achievement data cited above offer insight into the world that we encountered at Freeway. But these data do not tell the whole story. In fact, only looking at these data obscures the practices and social relations that present a more nuanced portrait of Freeway. Thus, our analysis is attentive to the diverse ways Freeway students “do school.” In her investigation of a group of high-achieving high school students, Denise Clark Pope identifies a number of ways that they craftily manage the stress of high-demand courses, hypercompetitive extracurricular schedules, and parental expectations that they gain admission to a select college.33 During our fieldwork at Freeway we considered this question: How do students in resource poor and under-performing school settings do school?
Much of the research to date has been influenced by the view that low-performing black students, for example, foster an oppositional culture that negates academic achievement.34 This claim essentially states that black students do school by trying to fail. In recent years, however, researchers have challenged the oppositional culture perspective.
For example, Prudence Carter suggests that black students’ struggles in school may have less to do with an opposition to learning and more to do with an opposition to authority and a disciplinary apparatus that subjects them to harsher punishment and cultural misunderstandings over their sartorial styles, language, and sources of cultural capital.35 Karolyn Tyson argues that the academic experiences of low-achieving students may be shaped by the practice of resegregation, especially in the form of being sorted into low-ability classes that often establish extremely low expectations.36 Angel Harris compiled an impressive array of data to demonstrate that “kids don’t want to fail” in school.37 Harris maintains that most black students value school and want to achieve but that they may not know how.
In
