"Few aspects of the daily life of residents of priority urban districts (QPV) escape digital technology. It is often synonymous with emancipation, access to knowledge for all, opening up and new opportunities.
This observation gave rise to the Digital Capital action-research project, led by the Ouishare x Chronos Lab. Ouishare and Chronos set out to better identify and understand the digital practices of residents in four priority neighbourhoods in city policy: in Bagnolet, Besançon, Bobigny and Saint-Laurent du Maroni.
A continuum of digital practices
Digital practices are numerous and diverse within the neighborhoods studied.
There is no clear boundary between the digitally included and excluded, but rather a continuum of practices, reflecting contexts and situations of life.
Among the residents they interviewed, 9 of 10 own a smartphone (or have access to one when borrow it from a third party) and only 5 out of 10 had access to a computer in their home.
Only half of the inhabitants have a mobile package that includes data to browse the Internet and several people told us that they often have overpayments. Also, only 3 out of 10 inhabitants have a fixed internet line at their home.
By far, the most common communication practices are using social networks or messaging applications.
"The young college students we met on our grounds play video games like Fortnite, read short stories on a mobile app called Wattpad, and follow tutorials or tutoring on YouTube. But these young people also help their parents by writing emails for them, or by doing some of their administrative tasks. They can also use digital tools or services to earn some money.
By reasoning in terms of fracture, the authors observe, there is a risk of assigning individuals "to a status of digital relegates, which would lead to the construction of answers ignoring their current practices and their trajectories.
The authors of the study make a severe judgment on the digital mediation actions deployed in the social action structures (associative or institutional) that they had the opportunity to observe. " The personnel often overwhelmed by the influx of The mediator, because of the size of the step to be taken to empower people, carries out the steps in their place. This mode of mediation does not allow to reinforce the capacities of action of the persons".
They also question the digital training offers "which are too focused on office automation tools and everyday digital applications, particularly administrative ones. (...) These training courses offer learning bricks aimed at meeting needs that are certainly recurrent, but they are restricted to the sphere of access to rights".
Too focused on online administrative procedures, too uniform, semi-collective, these trainings are " not able to respond to the heterogeneity of the demand ( ...) The participants leave without a memo or training material, and rarely take notes. Knowing that the inhabitants carry out the administrative procedures for which they are trained in a very punctual way, they quickly forget the advice they have been given".
"The proposed training courses (...) rarely take into account, on the one hand, the digital practices and skills of the inhabitants and, on the other hand, their personal levers of involvement."
Make better use of the levers of involvement of the inhabitants
The representation of these inhabitants " as digital outcasts, struggling with the use of the Internet.tion of digital tools and services, whatever they may be, contributes to keeping them in a position of "learners in difficulty", victims of a dematerialization that is beyond them and to which they must find an emergency situation. However, the people benefiting from training often have heterogeneous levels of comfort and competence in digital matters, and equally varied motivations (accessing social rights, finding a job, being able to communicate with people who are geographically distant...)".
Without systematic assessment of these skills and motivations, the authors add, "it is difficult to provide people with the stories they need.nude they need, or at least to direct them to the appropriate structures".
" Gradual pathways would have to be invented, first to meet the pressing needs of people (declaring one's resources in order to receive the RSA, for example) and then to envisage, at a later stage, a more empowering rise in skills.
Four lessons
After more than a year of research-action focused on the digital practices of the inhabitants of four priority neighborhoods of the city policy, Ouishare and Chronos draw four key lessons :
- Ihere is no digital divide between the digitally included and the digitally excluded, but there are rich digital practices, rooted in very diverse situations, and inequalities in the activation of the opportunities they open up.
- Digital trainings are focused on digital tools and do not empower the inhabitants.
- The resources dedicated to digital support each have their limits and suffer from a lack of readability and overall coordination.
- In the face of 100% dematerialization, local places are essential to create bonds of trust with people and adapt to the complexity of their situations.
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