Digital Sociology Podcast Episode 21: Huw Davies, young people, technology and social class

 In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I am talking to Huw Davies who is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

Huw tells me about his research into young peoples' use of technology (and particularly the internet). His research has shown that there are significant social class differences between how young people of different social class backgrounds tend to use technologies. However, this doesn't always follow the patterns we might expect. He has found from his detailed research with young people that many might not be engaging with the school curriculum on digital literacy (for instance) but nevertheless have sophisticated skills and are quite entrepreneurial with online and creative activities.

The two papers of Huw's we discussed were:

Davies HC and Eynon R (2018) Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’? New Media and Society. DOI: 10.1177/1461444818783102.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444818783102

Davies HC (2018) Learning to Google: Understanding classed and gendered practices when young people use the Internet for research. New Media & Society 20(8): 2764–2780. DOI: 10.1177/1461444817732326.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444817732326?journalCode=nmsa

Huw is one of the conveners of the British Sociological Associations's Digital Sociology study group (along with me and a few others) which you can follow on Twitter @bsadigitalsoc