Parents from the least economically developed field sites (Brazil, China and the rural component of our south India field site)14 are beset by marked financial inequalities. They often expressed a general frustra-tion at the failings of local schools to equip students properly with the skills and knowledge required for success in formal education, work and life more generally. In response many young people were inventively appropriating social media to provide supplementary means of learning and networking that they believed would contribute to their education.
On occasion they saw these as more useful and relevant to their lives.
In the Brazilian field site Spyer noted that parents viewed their children’s interest in computers as positive for their future, believing it would help them to become better informed and more connected with the world. By contrast teachers saw social media as the ‘bad internet’, distracting children, having a detrimental impact upon their studies, undermining professional authority and causing disruption in class;
Google on the other hand was regarded as the ‘good internet’, a relia-ble source of knowledge. Students felt that social media helped them to improve their reading and writing skills, partly to avoid criticism of their misspellings from peers, something which was acknowledged nei-ther by parents nor teachers. Social media also provided some autonomy from parents, who often had significantly poorer reading ability.
The south Indian field site mapped this variety in attitudes onto social class and the type of schooling received. Venkatraman noted mas-sive variation among middle schools (students aged 11 to 15) in both environment and teaching quality. Children from wealthy and middle- class families attending private and international schools tended to use social media with comparatively high levels of monitoring by their par-ents – the result of parental concerns regarding the effect of such use on educational achievement. In contrast children from poorer families who attended state schools generally held far more positive attitudes; their
parents perceived social media sites as educative in and of themselves, regardless of how they were used.
Similarly lower class parents – whose children attended schools that lacked comprehensive ICT facilities and teaching – tended to encourage their sons in particular to use social media, hoping that this would give them ICT skills and thereby employment in the enormous IT park being developed in the area. Unmarried women from lower income families were prohibited from owning mobiles, mostly because of fear that its use might lead to marriage outside of caste prescriptions.
However, many young women circumvented these restrictions, access-ing social media through the phones of school colleagues or by takaccess-ing an office job that required having a mobile phone with internet access.
In industrial China Wang found that migrant factory workers showed little interest in their children doing well in formal education or continuing into higher education – a marked contrast to standard gen-eralisations about education in China,15 this highlights the radically dif-ferent value systems held by these groups. The factory workers saw their children’s withdrawal from school in favour of manual labour as inevi-table. This was compounded by segregation of these children from local residents in separate schools. Wang noted that, given this disengage-ment from formal education, factory workers and their children often used social media for reading extensive articles on topics they regarded as useful, for instance self- help, nutrition, health and financial advice.
They seemed less concerned with sharing or communicating these with friends. Instead they archive such postings on their own profile page so that they themselves could return to view them later. This appropriation of social media for storing and reviewing knowledge exemplifies the way populations convert particular platforms into tools for learning.
The situation was quite the opposite in the rural China field site.
Here parents placed great importance on their children’s education, believing that academic achievement would help their children obtain a secure and comfortable life. In this context social media was largely understood (not only by parents, but also by students themselves) as having a negative impact on educational progression and learning.
Students spent long hours in school each day. During the summer holi-days they often attended expensive private tuition classes in the town.
Parents wanted their children to reach university, but had little under-standing of what skills students needed to do well in exams or what life inside university was actually like.
All of these constituted considerable restrictions, despite which students found ways to access social media. They made extensive use
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of ‘QQ Groups’, instant messaging groups whose membership often cor-responded to their physical class groups. Apart from allowing for con-tinued socialising with classmates outside of school time, students used these to share homework answers and get help from other classmates.
Asking for help from peers was especially important given that parents often lacked knowledge relevant to their homework and physically meeting with classmates outside school time was often difficult in this rural area.
If the Brazilian, Chinese and south Indian field sites feature con-siderable disparities in wealth, some families in the comparatively more equal south Italian field site had similar reservations regarding the ability of schools and colleges to equip their offspring comprehen-sively for the job market. Nicolescu notes that while teachers typically prohibit the use of mobile phones in classes, many students, especially those from vocational schools, felt entitled to use these devices in the classroom. They felt it was the traditional forms of kinship and soli-darity, fostered by social media, which would prove more useful than formal education in helping them to find work. As a result the teach-ers stood out as the only group not advocating social media use by students.
Economic status was also a factor in differentiating attitudes to social media in Trinidad. Prosperous families prefer to enrol their chil-dren at prestigious private schools and pay for after- school lessons.
Such students typically use the internet and social media to undertake research and complete school assignments. By contrast lower income families, often headed by adults with very little exposure to formal edu-cation, place less emphasis on social media use for children. Similarly in the field site in southeast Turkey affluent and elite families favour social media as beneficial to education.
To summarise, this study found that in some of our sites it is wealthy families who have positive views on the use of social media for education. More commonly people who value and trust formal education are worried that social media might detract from this, while those who feel let down by formal education hope that social media will provide an effective entrée into informal education – and these are generally low income families. Factors include whether social media is seen as an instrument of social mobility or not, and also whether usage is seen as an accessory or alternative to formal education. Some of the more affluent populations also possessed more confidence that children would make positive use of social media. For example, in the English field site most secondary schools (for students aged 11 to 18) set up Twitter accounts
aimed at specific year- groups to keep those students informed about school- related activities.
In all these cases, however, widespread use of ICTs has transformed the relationship between formal and informal education. The most sig-nificant consequence was for our field sites in rapidly developing econ-omies such as Brazil, China and India, where people often hoped that social media and other ICTs might mitigate for what was perceived to be inadequate provision of formal education in certain areas. However, the perception of the educational value of these services related to a broader desire for achieving prosperity. This broader perspective on the impact of social media on education also emerges from our ethnographic con-text, which in turn reinforces one of the main lessons from our initial review of the literature: that understanding the relationship between formal and informal learning depends on acknowledging the social con-text of both. While prior digital technologies, such as search engines, may have impacted more directly on autonomous learning, with social media the key factor is likely the way the new communications facilitate more subtle shifts in the relationships between students, teachers and parents, thereby highlighting the critical social dimensions inherent to all kinds of learning.