The growing diffusion of new media raises questions about people's ability to appropriate new technologies for their empowerment. While information technologies (IT) have become a staple of adolescents' lives, we know very little about general trends in the use of specific types of services. Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook are used by millions of people daily, are constantly the topic of popular debates and have also become the target of legislation. Yet there is very little systematic work that looks at young people's uses of such online services.
Through original data collection, the overall project will allow us to (1) develop a baseline understanding of college students' Internet uses, participation and skill and how IT uses are integrated into adolescents' everyday lives; (2) implement and assess a training intervention targeting improved use, participation and skill; and (3) make methodological advancements regarding information integration from diverse data sources based on surveys, observations and mobile computing applications related to people's everyday communication practices, methods that will be generalizable to the study of IT uses by different groups.
Intellectual Merit
There has been considerable debate about whether information technologies are alleviating or contributing to social inequality. Related research tends to focus on access differences with little emphasis on the disparities among users especially concerning a fully wired population. There is little systematic analysis of adolescents' digital media uses based on a representative large sample.
Broader Impacts
As the use of digital media diversifies with people relying on multiple devices to keep in contact with their networks and access content, it is essential that we develop ways in which we can collect and integrate data about the diverse nature of user practices. The methods developed in this project will be relevant to more and more types of data collection in the future as research on users catches up with media use trends and integrates user practices into data collection procedures.
