POPLOG

We know little about the specific characteristics of the working classes' relationship to digital technology. There has been extensive research on the uses of digital technology but, with some exceptions, it has focused primarily on the innovative uses of young, educated city-dwellers. Many studies have been done on working classes but they have paid very little attention to the transformations induced by the digitization of culture and the development of electronic communication. The project is located at the articulation of two processes: the reconfiguration of working classes -characterized by greater social heterogeneity-, and the democratization of the internet - during the last few years in France, individuals with a low level of education partially caught up equipment. This project intends to empirically document the way in which these "forgotten" audiences have grasped – or not – certain opportunities opened by the digitization of culture and the development of electronic communication. Far from analyses in terms of lack and absence, we’ll follow the principle that Hoggart defended, that there are certain values peculiar to these social classes, which might explain why certain uses are appropriated while others tend to be neglected because deemed to be irrelevant to daily life : the devaluation of written communication and the enhancement of face to face, reluctance to personal practice in favor of collective practices the priority granted to maintaining family cohesion , maintenance of an impervious boundary between professional and private worlds , the valorisation of practical skills, the organization of sustainable local sociability around certain leisure activities , etc. We will assume that digital uses are apropriated -or not- depending on their relevance to these values while at the same time might make them evolve, accentuating some process of cultural decompartmentalization already at work. The project focuses on three research areas: communication and sociability , knowledge and skills , culture and hobbies. It mobilizes three research teams of sociologists specialists either of media and new technologies, or educational issues in popular settings. The research will be designed according to a principle of monographs with a localized approach mobilizing qualitative and ethnographic methods . Our aim is obviously not to claim to exhaustively cover all uses of digital culture in the working classes. Instead, the project is designed to analyse the social logics of appropriation of cultural opportunities opened up by digital technology in a few carefully targeted groups that have as yet been studied very little, if at all. Our priority will be the inhabitants of residential areas situated outside large cities, and particularly rural and semi-rural populations. Our attention will primarily be on occupational sub-groups on whom we have very little information regarding their uses of digital technology such as employees in the sector of personal services, small farmers and farm workers, low qualified agents of public services. The research will take place over three years , with regular coordination mobilizing researchers associated with the project and will culminate in a final international conference , "The uses of digital literacy : Hoggart 2017" .