Lim Sun Sun, PhDAssociate Professor & Assistant Dean

National University of Singapore

Online But Disconnected In A SmartNation?

Information Literacy Issues Among Underprivileged

Youth In Singapore

Mobile first? Mobile only?

Paradoxically widening yet narrowing digital repertoire?

• After Access (Donner, 2015)• mobile centric, mobile first

"Overall, it is my assertion that on balance, holding all other moderating factors equal, those with mobile only digital repertoires face greater constraints in effectively accomplishing the full range of possible Internet activities, relative to those with broader digital repertoires....we should consider not only what mobile phones can now do well, but also what they still cannot…..in mobile-only or mobile-centric digital repertoires, they are unlikely to surf and browse; rather, they will dip and sip” p.118

The Potentiality-Actuality Chasm

• Mobile and app-centric profile Internet = WhatsAppInternet = Facebook Internet = Instagram

Internet = Twitter Internet = Snapchat Internet = Musical.lyInternet = YouTubeInternet = Carousell

Internet = Online shoppingInternet = Games

The Diminution of Incidental Learning

• Pre-smartphone

– Possibility of serendipitous online discoveries

– Information seeking and communication

– Innate understanding of online ecosystem

• Post-smartphone

– Communication, entertainment and transactions prevail

– Confined within the architecture of apps

Costs of App-Centrism

• Premise of information/media literacy as an ideal

– Illusory sense of connectedness and self-efficacy

– No active exploitation of the medium’s affordances for learning, participating, creating and producing

– Satisfaction below optimisation, “good enough” mind set

Consequences of the Quality Divide

• Device divide influences activity breadth (Rice & Pearce, 2013)

• Capital-enhancing uses of the web (Zillien & Hargittai, 2009)

• Consider how internet use alleviates or contributes to existing educational inequalities (Zhang 2015)

• More frequent information-seeking activities predicted better reading literacy while more frequent social entertainment activities led to poorer reading literacy (Lee & Wu, 2013)

Underprivileged Youth andSocial Mobility

Infocomm Literacy and the Family

‘‘Everything my child does is my fault or my responsibility.”

39-year-old Korean mother

Resource Prioritisation

• Smartphones offer attractive value proposition

• Deemed a necessity - families most concerned about connectivity

Scaffolding

• Absence of ‘warm experts’ (Bakardjieva, 2001)

• Narrowing of skills set

Oversight

• Parents lack competencies and awareness

• Rudimentary supervision undermined by ‘role reversal’

Future Imperatives• Refine media usage/literacy assessment so that data

can be more instructive• Pay more attention to nature and quality of internet

use by mobile-only segment (over time)• Fine tune media literacy education

THANKYOU