The document discusses research into how teenagers use the internet. It finds that teenagers can be grouped into categories like socializers, pragmatists, academics, non-conformists, and PC gamers based on their internet habits. Each group has different levels of independence, skills, and motivations online. The research also uncovered challenges in fully understanding teenagers' agency online due to intersecting influences like gender and corporate/government powers shaping the digital world.

1. Oxford Internet Institute
What We Don’t Want to Know
About Teenagers Online.
Huw Davies, Rebecca Eynon, & Laura Pinkerton
The Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
@oiioxford

2. Oxford Internet Institute
Background
Teenagers’ time is increasingly colonised by
extensions to the school day.
(This is classed, relative to ‘ability’, school’s
priorities etc.)

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Background
Teenagers’ offline public presence continues to
be problematized.
They are being pushed back to their homes,
where many will remain domicile well into adult
life.
Consequently, the digital world is offering vital
opportunities for young people develop their
identity as they transition to adulthood.

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Online presence normatively
regulated
• Impulsive
• Naïve
• Superficial
• Unreflective
• Narcissistic
• Addicted
• Distracted
• Abusive

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‘Homo œconomicus' - saviours of
our economy
"We will equip the next generation so we have a
strong pipeline of specialist skills – from coding
to cyber – to support the tech industry and drive
productivity across the economy”
Karen Bradley, 1/3/17

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'homo œconomicus’

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Structural constraints
What we
want
them to
do
What
they’re
doing
What we
don’t
want
them to
Normatively
approved
Problematic –
anxiety inducingExercising agency

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Green Valley School

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Bluebird Academy

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Layers of digital engagement
Apps
(Closed propriety platforms - greatest opportunities
for corporations to capture & monetise user data)
Open Web
(Where educators want creativity to happen?)
Dark Web

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Appification of the Web

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Socialisers / Leisurists
PC Gamers
Non-
conformists
Pragmatists
Academic
conservatives
Propriety
corporate
compounds
Open
Web
Dark Web
Questionnaires
n = 113
Interviews
n = 46

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Socialisers / Leisurists
• A range of devices (dominated by the smartphone)
• Interactions via apps there often confined to corporate compounds
• Parents and children use settings and heuristics to manage risks
• Often light touch supervision e.g. Facebook friends/password
• A range of familiar (and less familiar) apps and social networks
• Most agency is a result of tension between autonomy and constraints
(especially user and parental anxiety)

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Pragmatists
• Usage confined to a games console (not always latest generation or
networked)
• And a cheaper or 2nd hand smartphone (often pay-as-you-go)
• Which they normally use only for apps to message friends arrange meet-ups
(e.g. games of football) or listen to music
• Can be very anxious about risks, immediate family or friends similar usage
• Low experimentation but often don’t think they’re ‘missing out’

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Dan
• Isn’t on any any social network (except
PlayStation network)
• Still uses SMS
• Likes to play snooker
• Watches old snooker games on YouTube
• Wants apprenticeship in electrical engineering

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Academic conservatives
• Will use apps to talk to friends and family
• Will discuss homework online
• Self-disciplined
• Not immersed in digital culture because it’s a distraction from school
work
• Also low experimentation

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Non-conformists
• Don’t feel they fit in school
• Find affiliates online
• Online = an alternative opportunity to explore their identity
• Confident users, high level of experimentation e.g. dating simulators
• Learn from other autonomous users (including PC gamers)

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Gemma
• “I think probably my parents finding out was the main thing because they’re
completely against social media and well they still have basically no idea that I’ve
got a fan Instagram account but the good thing is though is that because I haven’t
included my name or my age on there they’ll never know that it’s me.”
• I wouldn’t talk to my parents about it. I would probably talk to my best friend
about it, she really likes social media.

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Gemma on her friends
• “She’s going to Reading Festival in a couple of weeks and I
don’t know where Reading Festival is but she’s going by
herself and she’s younger than me and if she managed to
meet up with somebody that she’d never actually seen in
person then I don’t think I could ever do that.”
• “My Polish friend (pc gamer) I think you’re meeting him later
on today actually and he is just amazing with technology, like
he can do all these things on like JavaScript and stuff.”

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Gemma
I sent them The Empress some of my artwork and they said yeah that’s fine
you can, you know, come and do work experience. So I did that for about six
months and then they offered me a placement and I told them look I’m 15 are
you sure this is a good idea? And they said well yes, you know, we really like
your drawings could you come up with some concept character designs.
So I’ve been doing that for I think about four months now so and they just
send me cheques through the post. But it’s kind of weird because my
parents don’t like anime at all and so they kind of don’t know that I’ve got
this job thing. So I’ve kind of got to sneakily take the cheques out when I’m
going out with my friends to town and just cash them in in the bank but they
don’t really know (laughs) so that sometimes gets a bit awkward.”
I will probably never even go to like university.

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PC Gamers
• Built their own PCs
• Confident, self-taught & experimental
• Learned from communities on the Web such a Reddit (rather staying
confined to social networks)
• Said they knew more than their parents
• Uninterested in coding as it’s presented to them in school (so far)
• Attracted to the exotic and acquiring skills that make them look savvy

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Ross
Ross: Well, it’s like- we get bored sometimes so like we just go on the dark
web and just browse some of the stuff you can buy and stuff like that really.
How do you do that then?
Ross: Download a thing called Tor. It just allows you to go on the dark web
and then pretty much like, it’s like an unidentified tool. Well, they say you’re
unidentified but like I don’t really know that. But I know journalists use it.
So do you and your friends get together and go on it together?
Ross: Yeah, well like or you just get one person to go on there and just
share screens on Skype so then everyone gets to watch. But yeah.

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Hayden
I use Facebook for groups for the political discussion groups because I'm
interested in politics these people just think just shout at my opinions
because they're very right wing and it's really weird.
Sometimes I post political opinions and instantly delete them because of
employability because I'm very far left and I post stuff and employers don't
really like that apparently.
I backed out of it because I got quite scared looking at the Wiki of all these
things, it's like, oh that's weird.
Because I like the privacy because I just think that the government are going
to bring back the Snooper’s Charter, I hide it - like I may use a Spanish IP
sometimes -so it changes quite a lot.

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Challenges
• These teenagers operating multiple intersecting fields –
methodologically very difficult to capture
• Tension between (discursively constructed) power v agency e.g. gender
• Positive deviance?
• When untangling the circuits of symbolic power are existing
agency/structure ontologies up to the job?
• Position these practices relative to what we know about the digtial
platform capitalism as a ruthless stratifier

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In a nutshell
Even in the digital age does ‘the tradition of all
dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brains of the living’ (Marx, 1852) ?