Young people and the web: Understanding their engagement with online information through the concept of habitus

This chapter focuses on the methodological challenges of researching young people’s engagements with digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) for searching and making critical sense of information. Many scholars have problematised what they call the ‘popular rhetoric’ that encouraged us to believe young people were self-taught experts of this technology (see Bayne and Ross, 2011; Cheong, 2008; Hargittai, 2010; Jones and Shao, 2011; Jones and Czerniewicz, 2010; Lee, 2008; Livingstone, 2010; Ng, 2012; Selwyn, 2009). This popular rhetoric is embodied in Prensky’s (2001) concept of the ‘digital native’, which suggested young people were naturalised users of digital ICTs who possessed certain inherent forms of expertise. More specifically, scholars have questioned claims of digital nativity and associated digital sawiness (see Bennett and Maton, 2010; Brouwer, 2006; Cheong, 2008; Graham and Metaxas, 2003; Hargittai, 2010; Helsper and Eynon, 2010; Herring, 2007; Livingstone, 2007).