Laura Robinson

Providing an empirical base to flesh out the notion of ‘information capital’, this article charts the elusive linkages between information-seeking practices, vocational preferences, and information-opportunity structures. Drawing on data from focus group interviews with over 300 advantaged and disadvantaged students, the research examines the information-seeking practices and circumstances of students attending high schools in an agricultural region of California. The article outlines a novel typology of four distinctive information-seeking situations: Internet-reliant information-seeking (IRIS), personal community-reliant information-seeking (PCRIS), educator-reliant information-seeking (ERIS), and multi-channel information-seeking (MCIS). Each of these situations brings together particular information-seeking strategies with specific vocational and educational preferences and particular information-opportunity structures. The four groups of information-seekers exhibit distinctive internalized stances towards what they define as appropriate information-seeking strategies and useful information-channels for educational and career planning. Illustrating these patterns, the article uncovers the connections between students’ educational and career aspirations, on the one hand, and their online and offline information-seeking strategies, on the other hand. By drawing these connections, the analysis provides rich empirical scaffolding for the concepts of information-channel preferences and information-opportunity structures as they relate to information capital, concepts which have remained empirically underdeveloped.

While American teenagers are often presumed to be uniformly ‘wired’, in reality, segments of the youth population lack high-quality, high-autonomy internet access. Taking a uniquely holistic approach that situates new media use within respondents’ larger lifeworlds, this study examines the effects of digital inequality on economically disadvantaged American youth. Analyzing primary survey and interview data, findings reveal the roles played by spatial‐temporal constraints and emotional costs in creating disparities in usage and skills among differently situated respondents. A close examination of the interview material discloses a dramatic divergence in the informational orientation or habitus internalized by respondents with more- and less-constrained internet access. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of skholè, the work outlines the differences between the playful or exploratory stance adopted by those with high-quality internet access and the task-oriented stance assumed by those with low-quality internet access. Analysis reveals that those with low-autonomy, low-quality access enact a ‘taste for the necessary’ in their rationing of internet use to avoid what they perceive as ‘wasteful’ activities with no immediate payoff. The article closes with an eye to developing a theory of information habitus, a potentially invaluable concept in future research on digital inequality.