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Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age

Online ISBN:
9781479863570
Print ISBN:
9781479884575
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age

Sonia Livingstone,
Sonia Livingstone
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Julian Sefton-Green
Julian Sefton-Green
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Published online:
19 January 2017
Published in print:
3 May 2016
Online ISBN:
9781479863570
Print ISBN:
9781479884575
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Based upon a year’s ethnographic fieldwork with 27 members of an ordinary London class, this book offers an original, readable and engaging study of the lives of one class of 13 to 14-year-olds in a contemporary London neighbourhood. Telling the story of their lives at home, in school, hanging out with friends and online, it shows how the lives of young people today are shaped by the pressures of individualization and how schools, families and the young people themselves attempt to negotiate the meaning of education in a digitally connected yet fiercely competitive world. The book examines young people’s concrete experiences of growing up in early twenty-first century Britain, asking: what matters to them, what vision of the future do they think their parents and teachers are preparing them for, and how are they facing the opportunities or challenges that lie ahead? While media, public and policy discourses express hopes and fears about the potential of digital media networks, the book shows how young people, along with their parents and teachers, are more invested in maintaining their separate spheres of interest. Thus they exercise their agency more to disconnect than to connect with others or across activities or places. The Class’s intersecting portraits of 27 children provide new insight into a host of academic, policy and practitioner/educator debates about what it means to grow up in contemporary society and what roles family, school, community and media now play in the lives of young people.

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