Participation in the Culture of Digitality Child Poverty and the Opportunities of Digital Education

Abstract

In his book «Kultur der Digitalität» («The Digital Condition»), Felix Stalder opposes to the idea that the Internet and the technology associated with it have changed the contemporary culture. He argues that it is cultural developments themselves that have brought about technological change. Stalder interprets digitalization to be the result of media-theoretical changes in the context of the emergence of mass media since the 1960s and interweaves these considerations with the diagnosis of a comprehensive culturalization in late modernity, which reveals parallels to Andreas Reckwitz’s «Society of Singularities». Those media and cultural developments are constitutive phenomena of media pedagogy in the sense that education and upbringing have always had to adapt to the newly emerging media technology. In this paper, the culture of digitality as well as media pedagogy will be discussed with regard to the thesis that the culture of digitality must be about teaching children and young people the cultural techniques of digitality, including referentiality and community, and about placing media education in the context of these cultural techniques. The thesis is based on the fundamental agreement with Stalder’s theory of the cultural significance of digitality being opposed to a purely technological view of the digital. The main thesis of this paper argues that a perspective from cultural studies on the phenomenon of digitalization – and digitality means nothing else – derives its social and media-pedagogical relevance from the core characteristics of digitality described by Stalder. These are connected in the article to the media-pedagogical discourse on digitalization. This results in revealing parallels between the necessary skills of the subjects in the culture of digitality and the informal learning of young people in dealing with digital media, for example. The formation of these forms of learning according to the characteristics of the culture of digitality and the society of singularity has, as will be shown, concrete consequences for the participation opportunities of young people. If they are already integrated into complex, cultural and social settings, informal learning and the resulting or failed participation becomes a challenge, especially for children and young people in poverty situations, but also holds opportunities. The materialistic concept of poverty is taken up in the debate about the first, second and third digital divides and it is shown that poverty in a society organized along economic lines makes cultural participation more difficult. Currently, the most ambitious project in this regard is the model of the «digital habitus», which is presented and discussed here. However, an interdisciplinary consideration of pedagogical research on the significance of digital media for adolescent development on the one hand, and cultural studies research on the cultural techniques of referentiality and communality necessary in the culture of digitality on the other hand, is helpful for the evaluation and socio-pedagogical treatment of the participation of adolescents living in poverty in the culture of digitality. Then it becomes clear that it is complex, integrating and development-promoting cultural techniques that enable participation in the culture of digitality and that media education programs must focus on these central cultural skills in order to achieve them.