Practical Digital Literacy: Exploring Practical Reasoning behind Teenagers Everyday Social Media Consumption
Practical Digital Literacy: Exploring Practical Reasoning behind Teenagers Everyday Social Media Consumption
Wednesday, 9 July 2025: 11:48
Location: ASJE014 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
Oral Presentation
Social media are one of the main matter of concerns regarding teenagers. These platforms in fact entered young people’s everyday life as complex sociotechnical infrastructures capable of supplying a constantly tailoring flow of content. Moreover, the growing time spent on along with possible negative outcomes spread out moral panic and anxieties (Rao & Lingam, 2020) which drive today’s debate towards the need of educating youths to be digitally literate.
Approaches to digital literacy however tends to be fragmented and normative when it comes to defining adolescents’ beneficial uses of platforms (Pangrazio et al., 2020). For this reason, I argue digital literacy research lacks in considering teenagers practical understandings of social media experiences, that is the practical knowledge to competently partake on said platforms which I refer to as practical digital literacy.
This research therefore aims at unravelling how teenagers consume and interact with social media content and which criteria are employed to define content of quality. The theoretical framework is drawn upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu who conceptualised practices as manifested embodiment of social structures deployed to properly participate in fields of consumption (1990).
To this purpose, I conducted an ethnography in 13 classes from 6 high schools in Italy. Students were involved in activities built on the embedded lesson approach (Dennen & Rutledge, 2018): a methodological stance for delivering lectures while collecting data through fieldnotes, group interviews and a survey. The analysis merged thematic clustering of qualitative data to the multiple correspondence analysis of the questionnaire, that is a statistical method for enhancing interpretability between consumption patterns and sociodemographic factors (LeRoux & Rouanet, 2010).
The findings expand the current understanding of youth practical reasoning rooted in a platformized social life (Caliandro et al, 2024) which is fundamental to reconceptualise digital and media education activities.
Approaches to digital literacy however tends to be fragmented and normative when it comes to defining adolescents’ beneficial uses of platforms (Pangrazio et al., 2020). For this reason, I argue digital literacy research lacks in considering teenagers practical understandings of social media experiences, that is the practical knowledge to competently partake on said platforms which I refer to as practical digital literacy.
This research therefore aims at unravelling how teenagers consume and interact with social media content and which criteria are employed to define content of quality. The theoretical framework is drawn upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu who conceptualised practices as manifested embodiment of social structures deployed to properly participate in fields of consumption (1990).
To this purpose, I conducted an ethnography in 13 classes from 6 high schools in Italy. Students were involved in activities built on the embedded lesson approach (Dennen & Rutledge, 2018): a methodological stance for delivering lectures while collecting data through fieldnotes, group interviews and a survey. The analysis merged thematic clustering of qualitative data to the multiple correspondence analysis of the questionnaire, that is a statistical method for enhancing interpretability between consumption patterns and sociodemographic factors (LeRoux & Rouanet, 2010).
The findings expand the current understanding of youth practical reasoning rooted in a platformized social life (Caliandro et al, 2024) which is fundamental to reconceptualise digital and media education activities.