The Class

Front matter

Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green

The Class

The Class

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Invitation to Meet the Class

Index

About the Authors vil

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Figures and Tables

Figures

Figure 3.1. The class as a social network

Figure 3.2. Mark's ego network

Figure 3.3. Scatterplot of in-school and out-of-school contacts in class members’ ego networks

Figure 4.1. Gideon’s ego network

Figure 4.2. Megan's ego network

Figure 4.3. Dilruba’s ego network a

Figure 8.1. Yusuf’s “study”

Figure 8.2. Adam's bedroom, showing places for work and play

Figure 8.3. Photographs of Saras Play-Doh creations uploaded to her Facebook profile

Figure A.1. Members of the class classified by their parents’

cultural and economic capital

Tables

Table 7.1. Media use by members of the class

Table 9.1. Private music lessons taken by members of the class

Table A.1. Research design overview

64 75

78 88 91

96 171 alsi

192 264 vii

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Acknowledgments

We first acknowledge the generosity and openness of the class of 13-year-olds and their families who let us into their lives during 2011-2012; this book may not make them famous, but we hope they like it should they choose to read it. We also warmly thank the school and the teachers who accommodated our research so helpfully, despite not knowing what we might say about them. We wish we could thank them by name, but we cannot as the school and the class could then be identified.

We also want to thank the many colleagues who have read drafts, debated ideas, and had their brains picked over the past few years. These include Hans-Christian Arnseth, Shakuntala Banaji, Alicia Blum-Ross, Georgina Born, David Buckingham, Lynn Schofield Clark, John Coleman, Ola Erstad, Pete Fraser, Oystein Gilje, Jenny Grahame, Glynda Hull, Henry Jenkins, Ken Jones, Koen Leurs, Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Danny Miller, Helen Nixon, Ricarose Roque, Stuart Poyntz, Jennifer Rowsell, Michael Simmons, Joseph Tobin, and many others—including the anonymous reviewers for New York University Press.

The project was conceived and nurtured as part of the Connected Learning Research Network, led by Mizuko Ito; we have benefited greatly from collaborating with Dalton Conley, Kris Gutiérrez, Heather Horst, Ben Kirschner, Mizuko Ito, Vera Michalchik, Bill Penuel, Kylie Peppler, Jean Rhodes, Katie Salen, Juliet Schor, S. Craig Watkins, and Amanda Wortman and with Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation.

As we conducted the fieldwork, we made many calls—variously interesting or tedious—on our able research assistants Adnan Muhammad, Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde, Yinhan Wang, and Rafal Zaborowski; we thank them too, as well as Dawn Rushden, who edited the final manuscript for us.

Sonia was fortunate to spend several months with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center, where she discussed The Class with Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, x | Acknowledgments danah boyd, Megan Finn, Mary Gray, Jessa Lingel, and Kate Miltner. She was, at the same time, a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thanks to an invitation from Urs Gasser. There she joined the book-writing group with Judith Donath, Rey Junco, Doc Searls, and Sara Watson and benefited from conversations with these and many others at the center. She is also grateful to the Department of Media and Communications at LSE for both accommodating her fieldwork commitments and then allowing her extended absence while writing this book. The book group she formed on her return from Cambridge stimulated the rethinking and rewriting that got the book finished: warm thanks to Bart Cammaerts, Lilie Chouliaraki, Ellen Helsper, Peter Lunt, and Shani Orgad.

Julian would like to thank friends and colleagues who invited presentations and seminars on aspects of the work as it unfolded—many embryonic ideas from those sessions have now found their way into this book. Especial thanks to Imanol Aguirre, Jim Albright, Sara Bragg, Barbara Comber, Anna Craft, Michael Dezuanni, Keri Facer, Samuel Leong, Meaghan Morris, Greg Noble, Megan Watkins, Rupert Wegerif, and their colleagues and students. Thanks also to Jen Teitle, who edited a special issue of the Bankstreet Occasional Papers, where some early ideas from several chapters were published.

We have written this book with an eye to the interests and concerns of parents, teachers, and others responsible for young people's learning and welfare. We have tried to make it readable; but it is also an academic text, and so we have tried to find a style that can address a range of audiences. We want this book to provide an informed basis for policy and hope that its analysis can help teachers, parents, and others to navigate the difficult challenges of what it means to grow up today.

This book has taken up a good four years of our lives. Among other things, we have learned a good deal from working with each other. This book is a genuine and equal collaboration; we have shared and pored over every phrase and note, resulting in almost countless iterations of every chapter. Collaboration often requires some adjustment, and we both feel that each other’s skill, expertise, and knowledge has extended and challenged the other and that this book has taken us to a point we could not have reached separately.

Acknowledgments | xi

Nevertheless, writing is largely a solitary activity, and we both have more personal thanks. Sonia is hugely grateful to her family, who endlessly discussed the project as it unfolded, read more drafts than they could have ever wished, and put up with her absence while she stared at her computer for months on end: Harry Hutchinson, Anna Livingstone, Angela Livingstone, Joe Livingstone, Rodney Livingstone, and especially, Peter Lunt. Julian no doubt bored Alison and Sam Vydulinska even more than usual but appreciated Sam’s lovingly sarcastic “how was school today?” during the daily grind and still believes that this book can offer some answer to the fatalistic critique—“it’s school, what do you expect?”

x x *

Formally, we note that this book is based on a research project supported by the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation under Prime Award no. 10-97572-000-USP and the Regents of the University of California. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation or the Regents of the University of California.

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