3:20PM – 3:30 – High Order Bit: Just a Pretty Face(book)? What College Students Actually Do Online
* Fresh thinking and research about what types of sites and online services college students are using and how their engagement differs by socio-economic background and user attributes.
Speaker: Eszter Hargittai Assistant Professor Northwestern University
She starts with digital divide and proposes a second-level digital divide — the less connected. overall framework is that skill might influence how people use digital media. a bit about socio-economic status. who does all this work to change people’s lives.
differences in web skills was initial reseach including health info, job search and gov docs done in observational studies.
paper and pencil survye from march 2006 on 1300 college students at UIChicago. skills and uses. mostly first years. “the wired generation”
blog/journal 60% ever 29% daily
looking at new services. facebook 78% myspace 50% ebay 46.7%
google 9.4%; 38.3% wikipedia
chicago trib 64%
chicago sun-times 63%
need to see her papers to keep up. not much facebook specific here tho.
background and activity. sig differences – web for fewr than others – basically the ones you’d expect but no measures.
now moved to surveys. higher educated folks have higher skills.