Class in “the class”: conservative, competitive and (dis)connected

We recently spent a year with a class of 13-to 14-year-olds in a fairly typical London school.1 We followed 28 young people through their lessons at school, and in the corridors and playground moments of the school day, and then we spent time with them in their homes, meeting their parents, understanding their friendship groups, sharing their hobbies, discussing their social networks, going online together. Our interest lay in how this highly diverse group made sense of the world-what was expected of them, what gave them pleasure, and what problems they encountered. Our purpose was to grasp young people’s own views of the world and how these intersected with the views of their parents, teachers, and the wider society. Avoiding a media-centric approach, a central thread through our ethnographic portrait was the young people’s everyday use of media and, more profoundly, their experience of growing up in a so-called “digital age.”