The family digital divide: self-taught adolescents and difficulties in parental control

Those born in the digital age tend to possess self-taught literacy in the use of social media; such instruments become natural extensions of young people’s relational, social and educational context. Their parents, instead, appear to assume the role of passive spectators in the digital lives of their children; they are too remote from the new technologies for adolescents to imagine them as being guiding or protective figures in online activity. Within this frame we see emerging what we might call a “Family digital divide”, in which young people socialize among themselves online, while parents have difficulty in enacting strategies of virtual sharing and control, despite the clear urgency of “digital mediation” within the family environment.