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Mapping ICT Adoption among Latin American Youth

Rosalía Winocur and Carolina Aguerre

Introduction

The emergence and dissemination of information and communication technologies (ICTs) during the last two decades has promoted the expression “information society” to characterize this age. In Latin America, as in most developing regions, the uptake and benefits of new ICTs have followed a much slower pace than in developed regions. This continent, which has a tradition of inequality, poverty, and profound cultural differences, has encountered difficulties not just in adopting ICTs but also in making them available and at the service of the most vulnerable sectors of society. Among those who have suffered the most from this exclusion are young people, in terms of opportunity costs, since youth have been one of the primary targets of the hopes invested in ICTs as a motor of development. “New digital technologies are now the depositories of a renewed hope that technology will drive economic development and fight poverty” (Guerra, Hilbert, Jordán, & Nicolai, 2007, p. 31).

Despite the economic growth evidenced in the region since 2002, together with public policies focused on lowering poverty levels by 17% and reducing the gap between rich and poor (Puryear & Malloy, 2009), it is still a region of contrasts. Latin America is the most unequal area in the world in terms of the gap between rich and poor, followed by sub-Saharan Africa. Five of the ten most unequal countries in the world are in this region, although Brazil is one of these and accounts for a third of the region's total population. Even the most equitable countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Chile, Barbados, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, have a higher GINI Index than the most unequal countries in Europe (Puryear & Malloy, 2009). In terms of poverty, 46.1% of the population in Latin America was poor in 2008, with 33.2% defined as “poor” and 12.9% as “extremely poor” (ECLAC, 2008).

The use and incorporation of technology in a society are not independent of its social, cultural, and economic context. The scenario described above means the region faces challenges to address the digital gap. In response to these disadvantages, which have affected the incorporation of Latin American states into the global economy, governments have begun the work of narrowing the digital divide by designing and implementing policies for digital inclusion. The United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has incorporated ICT into its development agenda through the creation of the Plan de Acción sobre la Sociedad de Información de América Latina y el Caribe (eLAC, Action Plan for the Information Society of Latin America and the Caribbean). This initiative proposed building a platform to promote regional cooperation and integration of ICTs and articulating its goals on an international level, but with regional priorities. The Millennium Development Goals, the first of which is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015, are on the eLAC's action horizon.¹

In spite of the efforts that governments in the region have already made in terms of ICT inclusion, these policies and programs have had a varied focus and unequal outcomes. Many of these programs have been implemented recently, which means that their evaluation has not yet been undertaken in some cases and the longer-term impact is yet to be assessed. In this chapter we examine the underlying social, cultural, and economic context of ICT adoption by children and adolescents and their patterns of use, based on the results of quantitative and qualitative studies. An important caveat is that this work does not pretend to encompass all the programs and initiatives, or to cover all patterns of use of ICTs in the continent, but instead analyzes major trends of adoption following certain sociodemographic variables and cultural attributes, according to the available data.

Quantitative Dimensions of ICT Access and Use in the Region

Evaluating ICT access in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) presents multiple challenges. Initiatives like those of the Observatorio para la Sociedad de Información de Latinoamérica y el Caribe (OSILAC, Observatory for the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean), particularly from 2007 to 2008, as well as the statistics team at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), have attempted to harmonize and systematize data for the region. These projects are beginning to generate a greater uniformity amongst variables, including surveys and data-collection techniques. Nevertheless, data limitations restrict the ability to reach definitive conclusions about the impact of socioeconomic variables on the penetration and use of ICTs in Latin America and the Caribbean.

These difficulties stem from various causes. First, not all of the countries in the region have gathered statistics on ICTs, despite the fact that initiatives like those put forward by OSILAC and the ITU have established grounds for comparison. Second, the years in which surveys were completed vary from country to country. Another distinction is related to socioeconomic characteristics, which are also not homogeneous across the region. Finally, the rate at which technological changes are adopted can lead to outdated statistics; a piece of data only a few years old can quickly become obsolete (Sunkel, 2006).² Thus, comparisons can be challenging and inconclusive.

Despite these limitations, it is critically important to use the available data so that the social determinants of ICTs can be evaluated and major challenges – such as widespread access – can be addressed. In what follows, we present some important trends with respect to ICT access in Latin American homes, also identified in studies by Sunkel (2006), Hopenhayn and Miranda (CEPAL, 2004), and Minges and Olaya (2008). We have made efforts to include the greatest number of countries in the quantitative analysis, but the aforementioned restrictions in the existing databases and statistics, added to the large number of countries that comprise the region, make it practically impossible to cover them consistently with the same variables and analytic dimensions.

A salient feature is that in Latin America, traditional media predominate over “new” ICTs. Latin American homes are less likely to have access to ICTs than to traditional media such as radio and television. This is especially troubling given that the penetration of television and radio in the region is already poor in comparison with developed countries (Mastrini & Becerra, 2006). Mobile phones are an exception, as they have surpassed landlines in various regions on the continent and within each country (see Table 23.1).

Table 23.1 Percentage of ICT access in the home, by type of technology

Table 23.2 Percentage of Internet access in the home, by education level of head of household

The largest impact on the availability of ICTs in the home is income, followed by years of education completed by the head of household. ICT penetration in homes grows proportionally to these two variables. As Table 23.2 shows, there is a strong correlation between the head of household's education level and home ICT access. The largest leap is in those who have completed secondary to higher education, or incomplete technical education, in all of the countries analyzed.

These data indicate that the tendency to value ICT access positively is related to a higher level of education. However, this relation is strengthened when one takes into consideration that throughout Latin America there is a strong correlation between education level and socioeconomic level. People with a higher level of education are more likely to have a higher income than those with a lower degree of education and thus are in a position to afford the cost of home ICT access (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo [UNDP], 2006). The data presented in Table 23.3 support this interpretation. In the case of household income level, it is worth noting the leap in the fourth quintile, which is close to doubling in the cases of Brazil and Mexico, nearly trebling in Colombia, and more than trebling in Peru and El Salvador. The greatest difference between the fourth and fifth quintile is registered in El Salvador, Peru, and Mexico.

This trend can also be seen in other countries in the region. Urresti (2009) shows that in Argentina in the 1990s, the middle and upper socioeconomic sectors were early adopters of new technologies, which increased the levels of demand in both homes and businesses for more computers and greater Internet access, particularly in the city of Buenos Aires. Therefore, in Latin America the rates of access to technological goods and connectivity in various districts within cities like Buenos Aires, San Pablo, Mexico City, or Santiago have been comparable to cities in Europe or the United States. However, these relatively high rates of connectivity are much lower in small cities and towns, and more so in rural environments. In this sense, ICT adoption follows the same trend in terms of access as those of traditional media and other services (such as sewage, electricity), discriminating positively for the inhabitants of cities and negatively for semi-rural or rural environments that face greater challenges and gaps.

Table 23.3 Percentage of Internet access in the home, by household income quintiles

Nevertheless, this early and high rate of adoption by urban social sectors of a higher socioeconomic level produced a “trickle-down” effect in these cities. This was the case, for example, in Buenos Aires (Urresti, 2009), which generated a second wave of access in the information hubs, where the first public-access technology centers were opened at the end of the 1990s. This trickle-down effect was produced primarily by the lower costs of personal computers (PCs) and the expansion of Internet connectivity in the city of Buenos Aires. From a sociocultural perspective it followed a pattern of imitation from the cosmopolitan rich sectors (including national and foreign firms) to the middle classes. The youth in these lower- to middle-class urban sectors were the first to use new technologies in these public centers.

A second notable trend concerns ICT access in households with children and youth. The presence of children is one of the most influential factors for the adoption of ICTs in a household (Barrantes, 2007; ITU, 2009). Thus, surveys should count not only the number of children but also their ages in order to establish links to educational institutions. The number of children is also a central variable, given that throughout the world two-child households tend to have consistently higher levels of ICT penetration in comparison with those that do not have children (ECLAC, 2008). The LAC region is no exception.

Nevertheless, among households with more than two children, the percentage drops, and in those domestic environments with more than four children, it is even lower than in those with no children. The lowest numbers of computers belong to households with more than five infants. The data supplied in Figure 23.1 express these differences across five countries in the region. These data reinforce the relationship between income levels and access to technology in the home. Households with more than four children tend to be low-income, while those with an average of two to three children are typically representative of middle- to upper-middle-class sectors.

Figure 23.1 Percentage of households with a computer, by number of children in the household, 2005. Source: ECLAC (2008, p. 24).

A third trend concerns use of the mobile phone, a new technology that appears to be more resistant to inequality than other technologies. Table 23.4 shows GINI coefficients for ICT access in the home, providing a basis for evaluating disparities in access among different socioeconomic variables. The GINI coefficient is a useful statistical tool for measuring the distribution across diverse socioeconomic variables of ICT in the home. A GINI coefficient of zero represents perfect equality, while a coefficient of one represents the highest level of inequality.

The data in Table 23.4 offer a number of important findings about disparities in traditional and new media. The greatest disparity is found in Internet access, while radio reflects the smallest degree of disparity, being the most democratic medium (lowest GINI Index). Mobile telephones tend to show a more equal distribution than fixed-line telephones. Fixed telephone lines tend to correlate with gender, meaning that when the household head is a woman there is a tendency to have fixed landlines, while mobile phone possession depends on the number of years of formal education that the head of household has completed. The age of the head of household is central to determining the most equal distribution between television, computer, and Internet access. Indigenous groups correlate with a more equal access to the radio. In the context of the LAC region and in the majority of its countries, belonging to an indigenous ethnic group is strongly related to rural as opposed to urban environments, and to lower as opposed to higher economic status.

Table 23.4 GINI coefficients of ICTs in the home

The worst ICT distribution appears to be related to the number of children in the home, as has already been mentioned (and depicted in Figure 23.1). With five children, ICT penetration falls dramatically. Electricity is the second category that creates inequality, given that without this indispensable resource, there can be no access to television, much less to a computer. Even charging a mobile phone becomes difficult. Household income is the third inequality factor.

However, to consider the complete picture of media use among children and adolescents in Latin America, we must take into account the use of the mobile phone, a device that has become so ubiquitous that it is already beginning to take off as a platform for Internet access for the least developed countries in Latin America and the rest of the world (ITU, 2010a). It is worth noting that some developing countries, like Tanzania in Africa, already have greater email access via mobile phones than via computers (TNS Research International, 2010 Digital Life³), and Latin America with its higher than average mobile penetration (93%, when the world average is 73%) is already evidencing this transition to Internet access via mobile phones (ITU, 2010a). Nevertheless, although accessing the Internet through mobile phones is getting easier with each new generation of devices, it is still costly to connect given the expensive rates, and even more so for young people (Galperin & Barrantes, 2008) who tend to suffer more from unemployment – 16.6% unemployment rate amongst youth in the Latin American region, which is triple the adult rate of unemployment (Weller, 2006).⁴

According to a study of “The Interactive Generation in Ibero-America” (Fundación Telefónica, 2008)⁵ conducted in seven countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela), 86% of urban youth between 10 and 18 years of age own a mobile phone. The countries that lead this trend are Argentina (94%), Venezuela (93%), and Chile (93%). In terms of gender, girls prefer to use mobile phones more than boys (86% use amongst girls vs. 80% for boys). This study also found that communication is the most important use that the youth attach to mobile phones (80% use them for this purpose – SMS and calls), followed by the consumption of content (50% use them to listen to music, 47% to watch videos and look at photos, and 13% to access the Internet). A third use of the mobile phone is entertainment, while the creation of content (taking pictures and shooting videos: 50% and 45%, respectively) is a fourth use attached to this device by this age group. This research also points out that 33% of the youngsters have a mobile device as a present from their parents, who also pay for the monthly expenses in 63% of the cases.

Finally, the data on ICT access in Latin America reveal a hierarchy of access by country. According to the report Characteristics of Households with ICTs in Latin America and the Caribbean (OSILAC, 2007), there are three large groups in the region, organized by socioeconomic performance variables and access to ICTs in the home. The first group is composed of Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Uruguay.⁶ These countries have high levels of household ICT penetration for the region, and higher than average performance in almost all of the rest of the socioeconomic variables. The second group consists of the countries that perform well in the socioeconomic variables but have less ICT penetration in the home. This is the case with the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Paraguay, and Venezuela. The third group is made up of countries that have a below-average performance in socioeconomic variables and a low level of ICT penetration in the home. This group includes Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru. Tables 23.2 and 23.3 show the differences between countries in these distinct groups, which underlines the point made in the introduction, that ICT access and adoption are closely dependent on other socioeconomic variables and cultural features.

The Indicators in Perspective: Regional Strategies and National Plans

Up to this point we have examined household sociodemographic indicators, but in the LAC region other data suggest that collective forms of access to ICTs are much more common than in the developed world (ITU, 2010b; Maeso & Hilbert, 2006).⁷ Nevertheless, data available on the types of collective access for children and youth in the region are still uncertain, beginning with the lack of information on ICT equipment, Internet connectivity, and the impact on users in educational institutions.

For example, in Brazil, with the PROINFO Program (which dates back to 1997), 19.6% of schools were connected to the Internet in 2004, covering 14.3% of students (Villatoro, 2009). In Costa Rica the Educational Computing Program (PIE MEP FOD) was benefiting 51% of students at preschool and elementary level and 72.8% at early secondary level in 2004 (Villatoro, 2009). In Uruguay, the CEIBAL project, the only one-to-one access program following the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, accomplished in 2010 full coverage of the distribution of laptops to primary school children in state schools (which accounts for nearly 88% of all children – urban and rural – in the country) (Katzman & Rodríguez 2006; Martínez, Alonso, & Díaz, 2009).

While these programs were conceived under very different governments and societies, there is a common pattern: their objectives are associated with technology and its devices. ICT access in classrooms, for students and teachers, seems to be an increasingly central policy in these countries' educational plans. These programs differ from earlier projects that prioritized access to infrastructure in educational institutions (for example, the first years of the program Enlaces in Argentina, which started in 1999). Newer programs are now attempting to focus on technology and its uses, linking both content and types of work (on the network, with virtual platforms) as well as promoting mechanisms to bring people closer to knowledge and information. Another important aspect is the advance of the one-to-one access paradigm in educational realms, where programs like the Plan CEIBAL in Uruguay, Programa Una Laptop por Niño (One Laptop per Child Program) in Peru, and Conectar Igualdad (Connect Equality) in Argentina are already palpable realities.

Public access centers that provide connectivity to communities have contributed to the weakening of poverty as a unique variable for digital inequalities when they are present with human capital, i.e., facilitators and trainers. This has proved a distinct feature of the Latin American region and has proved particularly successful in rural communities and smaller distant urban centers (ITU, 2010b). These spaces have adopted diverse institutional and organizational arrangements that represent the public sector (telecentros, or centers where the public can access computer technology), civil society (access centers and training within social organizations), and the private commercial sector (Internet cafés) (Maeso & Hilbert, 2006). These venues, as applied research in the region indicates (Maeso & Hilbert, 2006; Proenza, Bastidas-Buch, & Montero, 2001), play a substantial role in providing access to the Internet and computers for low- and middle-income sectors. The appearance of these public access centers throughout the entire Latin American subcontinent, predominantly in the last decade, is now a focal point for public policy on the subject of ICTs in Latin America.

The results shown in Table 23.5 examine the relationship between the use of the Internet and mobile phones amongst children and young people, ages 10 to 24, from various countries in the region. The data present some interesting trends. On the one hand, children and young people from 10 to 19 years of age use the Internet more, in comparison with those aged 20 to 24 years old. These figures decline as age increases, confirming that usage patterns of children and young people are usually much higher than for adults. In the case of Mexico, there is a greater distance in Internet use between the 20–24 cohort and the 10–14 and 15–19 groups, a factor that can probably be linked to young adults accessing technology at work, while children and adolescents depend on access via educational centers or public access points.

The educational uses of the Internet represent a low to very low percentage in all of the countries studied. This suggests an important challenge for education in terms of competing uses for the Internet – predominantly social, with informational uses in second place. The tendency toward the one-to-one model of connectivity in primary and secondary education in various countries of the region is an important challenge for the provision of educational activities and content in the online environment.

While Argentina has not been incorporated into the OSILAC database (an initiative carried out by the ECLAC), it has carried out a Cultural Consumption Survey (SNCC from the Spanish acronym),⁸ with the latest edition published in 2008, which provides relevant information about access to and use of ICTs in this country (see Tables 23.6 and 23.7). The regional survey “The Interactive Generation in Ibero-America” (Fundación Telefónica, 2008) presents a similar landscape to that presented by the SNCC survey in Argentina on the patterns of Internet use by children and young adults. The predominant use of Internet services by children from 10 to 18 years in seven countries corresponds to the “communication” dimension (first chatting and then email).⁹ Although the “knowledge” dimension is not directly related to the educational uses expressed in Table 23.5, it matches the data of the SNCC (2008) from Argentina (Tables 23.6 and 23.7), showing a growing trend toward incorporation of the Internet in the creation and acquisition of information and knowledge.

Table 23.5 Young people's use of the Internet and cell phones

Table 23.6 Internet access for children and youth in Argentina

Table 23.7 Internet use by children and youth in Argentina

Qualitative Dimensions of ICT Access and Appropriation in the Region

Up to now this chapter has dealt with the macro-variables that have been most commonly used in studies of a quantitative nature in the region. Alongside efforts to measure the digital divide and the impact of government and international organizations' programs of digital inclusion, Latin America has developed socio-anthropological, qualitative studies that seek to reconstruct the experience of ICT appropriation among diverse groups of children, adolescents, young adults, and teachers of different sociocultural realities. In spite of the studies' isolated and dispersed nature, this line of research is very valuable because it sheds light on a number of phenomena that are difficult to measure, such as the emergence of social networks and virtual communities in the sociability of youth, the possibilities for accessing cultural and symbolic goods through networks of exchange, new knowledge that makes ICTs possible, and new forms of social inclusion and participation in the public sphere. Most of this research questions the instrumental view and the underlying assumptions of ICT incorporation programs from a theoretical and methodological perspective, arguing that these programs uncritically assume the neutrality of technologies and the universality of their effects. In this sense, they show the need to investigate the processes of incorporation and the multiplicity of the social uses of technology on a local scale (Urresti, 2008; Winocur, 2009), recognizing that local contexts lead to different ways of appropriating ICTs. These different uses are expressed not only in classic socioeconomic variables (e.g., age, sex, education level, income) but in the collective experiments of social movements and neighborhood organizations, as in the case of the unemployed in Argentina (Winocur & Benitez Larghi, 2010), in the alternative circuits of cultural production that young people generate, and in the processes of migration or displacement of families or some of their members. In what follows, this section will cover some of the main research conducted through this cultural perspective.

Over the last 10 years, scholars have conducted a wealth of qualitative research on ICT appropriation by adolescents and young adults in Latin America.¹⁰ Studies were done in Argentina (Aliano, López, Welschinger Lascano, Stefoni, & Guevara, 2009; Aprea, 2002; Cabello, 2006; Finquelievich & Prince, 2007; Light, Manso, & Vilela, 2001; Urresti, 2008); Bolivia (Arratia, Uberhuaga, & García, 2006; Uberhuaga Candia, Arratia Jiménez, & García Miranda, 2005); Brazil (Godoy Gomes, 2002; Seabra, 2008); Colombia (Cabrera Paz, 2001; Jaramillo, 2005; Jaramillo Marín & Ruíz Quiroga, 2009); Mexico (Castro & Zepeda, 2004; López González, n.d.; Robinson, 2003; Winocur, 2006, 2009; Zermeño, Arellano, & Ramírez, 2005); Peru (Loyola, 2006); Venezuela (Quero Ramones & Madueños Madueños, 2006); Chile (Arancibia Herrera & Carrasco Herrera, 2006; Arredondo, Catalán, Montesinos, & Monsalve, 2001; Silva Peña, Borrero, Marchant, González, & Novoa, 2006; Soto Valenzuela, Espejo Silva, & Matute Willemsen, 2002; UNDP, 2006); and Spain (Albero, 2002; Espinar Ruiz & González Río, 2008; Feixa, 2005; Feixa, García, & Recio, 2004; Feliu, Gil, Gil, & Rivero, 2003; Gil Juárez & Vall-llovera Llovet, 2006; González Río, Espinar Ruiz, & Frau Marhuenda, 2007; Martínez Borda, Lacasa, & De Guzmán, 2008; Naval & Lara, 2003; Rodríguez Pascual, 2005, 2006). Among this body of qualitative research, we have identified eight general observations concerning youth ICT access in Latin America.

The Importance of Collective Access to ICTs

In the research contexts studied, access to computers and the Internet is generalized to all youth and adolescents, with no consideration of the social sector they come from, even though there is a “clear predominance of those who come from homes with more resources in respect to the quality of their connection and exposure time to the Internet” (Urresti, 2008).¹¹ In Mexico, according to the Encuesta Nacional de Juventud 2005 (National Youth Survey, 2005), only 28% of those between 15 and 29 years of age had a computer in their home, although almost 70% (69.66%) know how to use one. With regards to the Internet, only 20% had a connection in their homes, although 60.75% know how to use it. In the case of mobile phones, only 56.5% have one, but almost 80% (79.95%) know how to use one.¹² Another relevant piece of information is that only 49.7% are in some type of formal education system. What do these figures tell us? In the case of youth, the adoption of new information and communication technologies does not depend fundamentally on having a computer or Internet connection at home. Often they have access in collective or public environments such as Internet cafés, schools, and universities. As previously mentioned, in various Latin American countries, including Mexico, the main sources of Internet socialization among youth between 15 and 19 years old are commercial venues with Internet access (OSILAC, 2007).

Cultural Capital as a Prerequisite for a Richer Appropriation of ICTs

Public universities, independent of the sociocultural origins of their students, are an exceptional environment for technological socialization, linked not only to curricular demands but also to university culture (Winocur, 2006). Nevertheless, Internet access does not guarantee equal opportunity to inform oneself, to belong, to debate, or even to play. The cultural and symbolic capital and the processes of technological socialization of young people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds generate different contexts of cultural appropriation through the Internet:

The Role of School and Friends

Various research efforts, carried out in very diverse sociocultural contexts, show that the first contact adolescents and young adults have with computers and the Internet, particularly in working-class sectors, is at school (Lizarazo, 2008; Urresti, 2008; Winocur, 2006). The first reference points for youth are school assignments, followed by games (Silva Peña et al., 2006; Soto Valenzuela et al., 2002). But the real socialization comes from friends and in informal spaces outside school, particularly in Internet cafés, which have proliferated in cities, or in community technology centers (Finquelievich & Prince, 2007; Robinson, 2003), as well as through initiatives implemented by civil organizations in rural and urban communities. Internet cafés are not only spaces of initiation into the navigation and utilization of programs and web applications. They are recreational spaces for the socialization and exchange of technological knowledge (Arratia Jiménez et al., 2006; Castro & Zepeda, 2004; Gil Juárez & Vall-llovera Llovet, 2006; Linne, 2009).

The Sense of Belonging in Virtual Networks

The growing importance of ICTs in young people's personal, social, political, and academic lives has transformed the traditional nucleus of information and sociability. It has not necessarily replaced more traditional forms of socializing, but instead has amplified or modified them: “The Internet is not a substitute for life outside the screen. On the contrary, it forms part of a continuity that facilitates the satisfaction of individual needs and the cultivation of new interests, often with the attendant creation of collective social capital” (Katz & Rice, 2005, p. 351). In the same sense, in spite of the growing proliferation of networks and virtual communities among young people, there is nothing to suggest that they replace family ties, romantic relations, or groups of belonging (Katz & Rice, 2005; Wellman, Quan Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001; Winocur, 2006). More likely, they serve ideally to recreate affective and leisure spaces in crisis or to cover up unsatisfactory aspects of oneself. Virtual communities have much more relaxed mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that allow youth to have a sense of belonging through technological and nomadic practices of constant identity reinvention. Thus the fundamental importance of these virtual networks and contacts does not reside so much in their capacity to multiply, or in their power to bring people together, as in the projection and validation of the needs of their members. What once was a form of exclusion here becomes a condition of belonging (Winocur, 2006). Other works examine the possibilities of cultural production associated with practices of ICT consumption among adolescents in leisure spaces (Arratia Jiménez et al., 2006; Feliu et al., 2003; Linne, 2009; UNDP, 2006).

Imaginaries on ICTs

For young people who have access to the Internet, particularly adolescents and university students, ICTs have become an imaginary universe that are particularly significant to their activities and relations. When they speak of what ICTs mean in their personal lives, they describe them as spaces of information, contention, and communication, not with the whole world but with those who are truly important to them (Winocur, 2009). They mainly use the Internet to stay in contact with people they know – with whom they have strong affective ties in the real world (relatives that live far away, friends from high school, romantic partners). They also use the Internet to maintain intense everyday life relationships developed through teamwork, information exchange, or technological socialization in the office, at school, or at university (Espinar & González, 2008; Feixa et al., 2004). Much of what happens on the Internet becomes meaningful to young people when they can practice its benefits in the real world. Everything that you can get on the Internet – information, entertainment, technological competence, new relationships – is capitalized on and fundamentally validated in the world of personal relationships. Behind every act of virtual flirting hides a secret hope that it will become a concrete, flesh-and-blood relationship; the majority of emails are exchanged between people who already know each other or between academic peer communities. The bulk of the information they search for, consult, and download is used to broaden a comparative perspective for work and investigations in academic or scholarly circles where they meet face to face, or as a source of prestige and inclusion in social spaces with friends and colleagues (Winocur, 2006).

ICTs and Symbolic Power for Youth

The Internet is often the only source of effective power that young people have; although its efficacy is only symbolic, it is still relevant in their daily lives. This illusion of power is expressed and exercised in various ways. First, in the possibility of connection–disconnection; in other words, when they want to “be visible” and “invisible,” and for whom. Second, in the resource of “infinite” navigation that translates into the pleasure of discovering and conquering diverse, contrasting, strange, and disquieting worlds, without leaving the certainty of home and without running any major risks. Third, and fundamentally, in the manipulation of virtual reality: creating and destroying an empire in minutes in a game of strategy, invading a friend's privacy by entering into his or her account; manipulating free software, designing a personal web page, creating a blog, or founding a community and imposing or censoring content, establishing the rules, and deciding who can be a part of it. As a consequence of this eagerness to “manipulate,” “conquer,” or “discover,” mainly what young people require and consume on the Internet is information. This includes information of all types and kinds, but what is prioritized, particularly in the case of males, is the web that they can spin around themselves through programs, using diverse tools and applications to create web pages, translating languages, mounting multimedia devices, and downloading music, movies, comics, and so on. In addition, they search, download, and edit information for the academic requirements of a variety of subjects. The majority use the most popular search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Altavista, but some also read blogs or electronic magazines as well. They also browse sites that advertise entertainment related to their tastes in film, music, and television. The consumption of information does not only have an instrumental value, in the sense of serving to support research projects assigned in the university, or to see what shows are playing; the fundamental value is symbolic (Cabrera Paz, 2001; Winocur, 2006). The web has everything that youth culture has made relevant and meaningful by showing and sharing it with others (Cabrera Paz, 2001). Until the early 1990s, film and television provided the basic symbolic material for conversation. Now, the Internet has not only considerably increased conversation topics, it has also changed the nature of that exchange – not only is information shared, but there are also new experiences of social interaction, competencies, and skills to manipulate on the Internet.

Youth Identity on the Internet

The way young people have incorporated the Internet into their lives, simultaneously entering and exiting online and offline worlds, suggests that participation in both has been integrated into contemporary daily experience, in the constant movement in and out of the domestic space, in different ways of being and inhabiting cities, and in distinct public and private, formal and informal environments: “Young people's practices use resources in a combined way – formal and informal, legal and illegal – to fulfill their desire to connect, inform, and entertain each other and themselves” (García Canclini, 2006, p. 4). Young people represent the web as a space where everything can be looked at, without censorship. On the Internet, young people act like they do in the mall: they want to see and to be seen. The Internet is a space of affirmation of identity. It is perceived as a library that condenses all human knowledge. The Internet is present and instantaneous. For young people, it is a scene of pleasure. It is understood as a place where someone is always available to listen; thus, its use is connected to sociability, without limits or borders, and where the main focal point is shared interests (Cabrera Paz, 2001; Castro & Zepeda, 2004; Feixa, 2005; Feixa et al., 2004; Winocur, 2006). The recreational character of the navigation and utilization of available programs has substantially improved the capacity to increase information and knowledge about diverse historical, political, social, and cultural realities, but this does not necessarily result in a better ability to reflect on them. It has also been found that for working-class youth, the Internet does not play a large role in supporting the formal learning process because in most cases they do not have the skills to use search engines effectively (Arratia Jiménez et al., 2006).

Old and New Educational Practices

In many public schools, the incorporation of ICTs has not added value to learning; they are incorporated into the “old ways” of the classroom in a manner that sustains “old” teaching practices (Jaramillo Marín & Ruiz Quiroga, 2009). In the case of teachers, the difficulty some have in using new technologies often provokes profound feelings of anxiety and insecurity because it directly questions their authority in front of the students.

Lizarazo's research on teachers and students in poor schools in urban–rural districts in the state of Mexico (who have had access to some kind of technology) shows the source of difficulty in their appropriation of these technologies. It does not derive from a state of “cybernetic anxiety” at an individual level but from “a sort of collective anxiety in two senses: that of wanting something that you can't have, and the hopelessness in knowing that you can't have it” (Lizarazo, 2008, p. 9). According to Lizarazo, this anxiety provokes a double paradox, on the one hand between the imaginary representation of ICTs as an opportunity for social inclusion, and that of real exclusion, “of radical differentiation and anachronism for those who don't have access to it, or lack the resources or skills to use it” (Lizarazo, 2008, p. 9). On the other hand, an almost irresolvable tension arises between the role that teachers should play as facilitators and providers of socially legitimate knowledge and the students' computer skills, which surpass the teachers' own knowledge and understanding. The outcome is not only a disparity in terms of skills, but also a profound questioning of the teacher's role as the mediator of knowledge and as the authority to regulate what should or should not be learned.

In Argentina, the publication Yo con la computadora no tengo nada que ver (I Will Have Nothing to Do with the Computer) (Cabello, 2006) argues that projects to incorporate ICTs in schools did not consider either the teachers' positions or their previous knowledge, which explains to a great extent their resistance to ICT usage for pedagogical purposes. This research argues that even if educators were open to incorporating computers into their teaching, they would find that the school and the technology are located in different worlds and have different logics; thus, the teachers feel they lack technological skills and knowledge and find their role in guiding the processes of ICT-mediated learning very difficult.

Final Considerations

This chapter has intended to map the patterns of use in Latin America at both the macro and micro levels. We have considered macro sociodemographic and economic variables with respect to ICT inclusion, as well as micro-level concerns, looking at children and youth's appropriation strategies of these technologies and analyzing the changes that have taken place for them as individuals, as well as in the different institutions in which they are inserted, mainly the family and the educational system. Although the lenses differ in both perspectives, there are consistencies when summarizing the main findings: (1) collective access to technologies plays an essential role in disseminating ICTs in the region and generating complex patterns of appropriation; (2) the role of the family is an essential driver for ICT access – both parents and siblings are important factors (the first mainly as purveyors of infrastructure and the second as providers of cultural capital and skills); and (3) ICTs are used in a media and communications ecosystem that includes traditional technologies such as radio, TV, and telephones, and within this ecosystem the main use of ICTs is to communicate with others.

The realities of incorporation and appropriation of ICTs in the region, particularly in the case of adolescents and young adults, are inscribed in family, work, and social conditions in which they operate daily. As Dina Krauskopf (2008) has asserted:

The flexibility and mobility of life trajectories has become a common brand of this age, particularly affecting youth patterns in terms of long-term horizons and projects. In some respects, their sophisticated uses of technology, in comparison with older generations, makes them more attractive for the job market. Their participation as subjects of production, where they are both symbolically and materially recognized, is an essential component of the future.

This view reflects on childhood from a sociological perspective (Livingstone, 2006), where the child/adolescent is as much an agent of change as a subject of appropriation of new technologies. In this sense, the Internet and mobile phones provide the youth a symbolic platform that compensates and substitutes for the lack of power in their real daily lives (Winocur, 2009). Faced with the obstacles of inclusion erected by many traditional institutions – particularly those involved with education, employment, and access to power – the young have developed flexible and mobile strategies of inclusion on the narrow margins of the formal routes available to them.

In a region where the socioeconomic context offers contrasting realities, the digital divide is a concept that still has explanatory potential (Compaine, 2001). Despite the efforts to provide greater connectivity and access, a subject that was approached mainly in the first part of this chapter, inequality is still rampant in the region. However, the real stakes are to be assessed not solely in terms of traditional access variables of infrastructure but, as the second part of this chapter has intended to show, by understanding how the youth of a developing region incorporate these technologies into their daily life strategies. The meaning of these technologies is embedded in their patterns of use.

NOTES

1 This is the case for the Compromiso de San Salvador (San Salvador Compromise), approved at the second Conferencia Ministerial sobre la Sociedad de la Información en 2008, el eLAC2010 (2008 Ministerial Conference on the Information Society, eLAC2010). Some of the main goals of this compromise include supporting the development of community-based networks (like computing centers, or telecentros); extending high-speed Internet coverage to 70% in urban areas; increasing the number of community ICT centers that provide access to the Internet; developing indicators that take into account advances in the multi-party process of developing national policies on the information society; and the elaboration of comparative studies on the economic and social impact of ICTs on policies and agendas.

2 An exemplary case is the Plan Ceibal, which from its implementation in 2007 to its completion in 2009 catapulted Uruguay to the top in terms of Internet access.

3 http://www.tnsglobal.com/market-research/technology-research/gti.aspx

4 In 2009, 93% of Latin Americans had access to a cell phone (compared to 30% in 2002), while the world global average is 73% (ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators database, 2010).

5 In this investigation the data came from an online questionnaire that was filled out in urban education centers in seven Latin American countries, which excludes all of the schools that do not have Internet access and that are located in rural areas.

6 It is worth clarifying that Argentina should be included in the first group, but at the time that OSILAC determined the three groups, the country had not provided data on ICTs. The variables were included in household surveys in the INDEC in 2007.

7 The authors point out that while in developed countries 1 to 17 users share one Internet host, in Latin America this number goes up to 134 (Maeso & Hilbert, 2006, p. 10).

8 SNCC: Sistema Nacional de Consumos Culturales. This program depends on the Media Secretariat of the Presidency.

9 Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.

10 The work of researching and systematizing the qualitative studies was done by Jaime Piracón, a student of the Masters Program in Social Sciences of FLASCO Argentina. We must point out that the trends mentioned correspond to the qualitative studies that were available on the Internet for consultation in the countries cited. In this sense, although they are very significant for the experiences studied, and for others that could develop in similar conditions, they cannot be generalized to the whole region, especially for those countries with a giant digital divide such as Haiti and some Central American countries.

11 It is important to note that all of the studies reported research carried out in diverse sociocultural situations where there was some form of incorporation and access to ICTs. Thus, their level of generalization and explanation leaves out areas where the large majority of the population does not have ICT access, as is the case with Haiti (98%).

12 Encuesta Nacional de Juventud 2005. Resultados Preliminares (National Youth Survey, 2005, Preliminary Results). Retrieved from Instituto Mexicano de la Juventud, http://www.imjuventud.gob.mx

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