Media practices of young Australians: Tangible and measurable reflections on a digital divide

Abstract

: This paper presents findings on the household availability of digital media devices and the uses made of this technology by young people aged 12 to 18 living within the Greater Melbourne area of Australia. Drawing upon questionnaire data from a purposive sample of 860 students frequency analysis of this data indicates three dominant factors shape a young person’s media experience: gender, siblings present within the home, and parents’ highest level of education 1 . Moreover, when examining the types of software programs and the social network services used by young people age emerges as an additional layer to understanding these practices. In order to help contextualise these digital engagements, a comparative analysis with youth in the UK and the USA is undertaken to explore the ongoing validity of previous research claiming Australian youth as being some of the most digitally connected youth in the world. This paper presents findings from Australian data collected as part of a larger European Union Horizon 20/20 funded eight-nation research project entitled Transmedia Literacy: Exploiting transmedia skills and informal learning strategies to improve formal education . Analysing questionnaire data collected from young people living in Melbourne, Australia, patterns emerge to the types of media used and the types of activities engaged. Three distinct factors emerge as shaping the media engagement throughout this cohort: a participant’s gender, whether they have siblings within the household and parents’ highest level of education; while age and gender are also essential to understanding the types of software programs and the social network services (SNS) they use. In order to contextualise the practices of these Australian youth comparative analysis is performed against data from youth in the UK and USA over a similar period to examine the commonality and differences to media engagements of young people within the world’s three principle Anglophone nations. Outside of government and state regulatory funded research bodies (i.e. the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)) findings presented here add to the limited body of work providing large-scale analysis to the media practices of Australian youth 2 . Similarly, this work adds to previous research, which establishes how the term gradation rather than divide better defines the digital media