Mobile phones and digital generations in EU5 countries: a comparison of the 1996 and 2009 survey data.

Mobile phones and digital generations in EU5 countries: a comparison of the 1996 and 2009 survey data. Leopoldina Fortunati1 and Sakari Taipale2 1 Department of Human Sciences, University of Udine, Italy (fortunati.deluca@tin.it) 2 Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland (sakari.taipale@jyu.fi) Abstract Mobile phone traffic data sets provide much-needed information on actual usage of mobile phones, such as the type, volume, place and time of usage. However, compared with traditional survey studies, traffic data involves only a small amount of information on users’ socio-economic background (e.g. they do not say anything about users’ education, marital status, occupation, income, family type or place of residence) and in some cases information on users, for instance their age, may be unreliable as Ling, Bertel and Sundsøy (2012) have shown. Furthermore, traffic data typically contains no motivational and attitudinal material. It is against this backcloth, that we will build our study on the analysis of two consecutive telephone surveys funded by Telecom Italia. These surveys, based on the same questionnaire (the questionnaire was slightly updated for the second survey) were carried out in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain (EU5 countries) in 1996 (N=6,609) and 2009 (N=7,255). What makes these data sets rich is that they contain much cross-national information and allow a comparison between 1996 and 2009 in EU5 countries. In this paper we will investigate, with a special focus on mobile phones, if it makes sense to talk about digital generations in EU5 countries. Several studies have already questioned whether the difference between digital native and digital immigrant generations, originally proposed by Prensky (2001), is justified (e.g. Herold 2012). It has been shown that both groups are internally incoherent, and other factors (e.g. breadth of use, experience, gender, education) have expressed in some cases more predictive power than age/generation (Selwyn 2004; Hargittai 2010; Helsper 2010; Helsper & Eynon 2010). In addition, it has been proposed that a so-called second generation of digital natives (born after 1990) could be separated from the first generation of natives (born in the 1980s) owing to their greater immersion in the social media (Helsper & Eynon 2010; Fortunati 2011). The abovementioned studies have typically dealt with single countries and have been premised on cross-sectional data sets. This study aims to see, firstly, whether the first generation of digital natives was the most technologically equipped generation in 1996 and did its relative position sustain until 2009. Secondly, we investigate if the first and second generation of digital natives differ from each other as regards to the use of digital technologies, especially mobile phones. We will use both bivariate statistics and Multiple Regression Analysis to analyse the data sets. With regard to the first aim, our preliminary results show that the youngest respondents were the most equipped with mobile phones (and personal computers) in 1996, but no longer in 2009. Instead, it seems that the youth and young adults, who belong to the first generation of digital natives – and who also were the first group to adopt these devices in 1996 – maintained their position in 2009. With regard to the second aim, our data shows that there were actually no substantial differences between digital natives and immigrant adults in Poster 2 // Network 26 Poster 2 26 166 relation to the made/received mobile (and fixed) phone calls in 1996. However, it appears that in 2009 the first generation of natives made and received more mobile phone calls and send more SMS than the second generation of natives. References Fortunati L. (2011) General Native Generations and the New Media. In F. Colombo and L. Fortunati (Eds.) Broadband Society and Generational Changes. Berlin: Peter Lang, 201–220. Hargittai, E. (2010) Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”, Sociological Inquiry, 80(1), 92–113. Helsper, E. J. & Eynon, R. (2010) Digital Natives: Where is the Evidence?, British Educational Research Journal, 36(3), 503–520 Helsper, E. J. (2010) Gendered Internet Use across Generations and Life Stages, Communication Research, 37(3), 352–374 Herold D. (2012) Digital Natives: Discourses of Exclusion in an Inclusive Society. In E. Loos, L. Haddon and E. Mante-Meijer (Eds.) Generational Use of New Media. London: Ashgate, 71–88. Ling, R. Bertel, T. F. & Sundsøy, P. R. (2012) The socio-demographics of texting: An analysis of traffic data. New Media and Society, 14(2), 281–298. Prensky, M., 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon MCB University Press, 95. Available from: http://pirate.shu.edu/~deyrupma/digital%20immigrants,%20part%20I.pdf [Accessed 20 December 2009] Selwyn, N., 2004. The Information Aged: A Qualitative Study of Older Adults’ Use of Information and Communications Technology. Journal of Aging Studies, 18(4), 369- 384. 26