“Keeping up”: one family’ s digital appropriation processes

Abstract

There are currently national and international statistics that provide data on the use and access to digital technologies in the population so that governments can develop public policies that reduce the digital divide. However, these statistics do not shed light on how people participate in a digital culture. In this article, I analyzed one family’s appropriation processes of digital technologies. This family lives on the southeastern side of Mexico City and in precarious conditions in terms of local infrastructure, income, and access to digital practices. My purpose was to understand the access and availability to digital resources and identify the relationships that mediated their appropriation process. I built a theoretical-methodological approach starting from a Sociocultural Perspective, New Literacy Studies, and the theory of Social Practice. Using this qualitative and ethnographic framework, I assembled a corpus of data from where I extracted digital events to show how complex it was for this family to appropriate digital technologies. The presence of digital resources at school, in the community or at home is not enough, appropriation occurs through technology use, participation in multiple social activities, and social relationships with other users that link learners with the knowledge and know-how necessary for incorporating technologies into their daily practices.