Social Media Assignment - 1) Review on 'New Media & Society - ICT as cultural capital: The relationship between socioeconomic status and the computer-use profile of young people'

This article from the Flanders/Ghent University of Belgium shows a very interesting and straight forward experiment which wishes to understand the relationship with socioeconomic status and the computer use of young people; its priority was to find out “whether varying patterns of computer access, attitudes, competencies and uses can be seen as constituting differences in cultural capital” (Tondeur, 2010). The report raised awareness that there is an intrigue to define ICT and its role in new media within society “looking, therefore, for contemporary suppliers of relevant competencies and skills, ICT becomes paramount.” (Tondeur, 2010)

The study surveyed over 1000 students from over 40 different schools around Belgium. There were several questions asked to determine how experienced they were in ICT skills and they were asked several possible scenarios in which they would require certain ICT skills and the students would answer how skilled they thought they were.

The results however were slightly pessimistic since they did not prove that there was any sign of social economic status and computer ownership among the students they have interviewed “what emerged from the analyses was that no relationship between SES and computer ownership was found for this group of students.” (Tondeur, 2010)
Nevertheless this was corroborated by previous research, suggesting that access to computers is no longer a unitary phenomenon and it can only slightly support the idea of treating the computer-use profile as a contemporary indicator of differing cultural capital.” (Tondeur, 2010)

My suggestion to the report is that perhaps the students from a lower socioeconomic status could have lied in the surveys pretending to have a better notion of ICT skills than the reports state in order to not feel humiliated or undermined by their classmates. This could be considered a rather sceptical idea but it might suggest a reason as to why the SES did not affect the ICT skills. Another point of view is that the socioeconomic status in Flanders, Belgium does not differ greatly from one student to another and therefore will not provide significant evidence, if perhaps students are compared from different parts of Belgium or even a zone in Europe various socioeconomic statuses will be revealed, thus allowing the research to be more thorough.

Lastly, ICT skills perhaps can’t consider a different socioeconomic status but they might reveal the differences through other methods, such as the content behind the purpose of using computers. It is true that there is only a slight difference between lower, middle and upper class when it comes to the computer skills but different uses the students have with those skills might determine their SES for instance a student that uses the computer to use his school work and another one only uses it for instant messaging and chat might prove one to be from a higher socioeconomic status than the other.


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