Distant Friends Online? Rural and Urban Adolescents’ Communication on the Internet

Abstract

This study explores how rural and urban adolescents use the Internet as a tool for communication in their social environment. It aims to analyse the differences in the use of the Internet to overcome environmental constraints between urban and rural adolescents. In this paper, environmental constraints are defined in two ways: (1) The lack of contacts that a person may have in his/her local environment and (2) The distance between the contacts that prevents him/her from having face‐to‐face social interaction. The empirical part of the research is a questionnaire‐based survey of two samples of pre‐university high school pupils in Den Bosch and Winterswijk in the Netherlands. The outcomes of the research show that pupils in the urban area find more emotional support in their physical environment than pupils from the rural area and that they also receive more emotional support via the Internet than their rural counterparts.

Self-exploration, anonymity and risks in the online setting: analysis of narratives by 14–18-year olds

“…The Internet's provision of tools toward the creation of increasingly effective social networks (Dooris, Sotireli, and Van Hoof 2008;Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007;Hargittai 2008) along with an enhanced capability toward the exploration and development of identity (McMillan and Morrisson 2006;Moinian 2006) help to explain its ever increasing popularity among young people today. The social mechanisms at work in this Internet arena can be categorized under the rubric of social media.…”

Rural development in the digital age: A systematic literature review on unequal ICT availability, adoption, and use in rural areas

“…In the micro-level literature, the research is aimed at finding out how people's lives and social positions are affected by the growing importance of ICTs, using social networks and social capital as conceptual bases (see for example Boase, 2010;Stern and Adams, 2010;Stern et al, 2011). Most micro-level literature, however, focuses on specific groups of mostly vulnerable people (see also Warren, 2007), such as rural children (Valentine and Holloway, 2001), rural youth (Laegran, 2002;Dooris et al, 2008;Awan and Gauntlett, 2012), rural women (Rubinoff, 2005), older people (Park, 2008), rural patients (Miller and West, 2009), or people living in remote areas, such as employees and teleworkers in rural areas (Simpson et al, 2003;Laegran, 2008;Brownlee et al, 2010), as well as farmers (Briggeman and Whitacre, 2010;Jeffcoat et al, 2012) and entrepreneurs (Grimes, 2000(Grimes, , 2003. A majority of these studies (11 of 13 papers) show that rapid digital developments make these groups more vulnerable to digital and social exclusion.…”

Young people’s internet use: Divided or diversified?

“…They also found that young people from non-urban areas played online games more frequently for want of alternative entertainment opportunities. Dooris et al (2008) noted that young people from urban areas obtained more emotional support through the internet than their 'rural' peers. This finding was based on a survey with 124 pupils attending university preparatory education in the Netherlands.…”

“…Besides these risks, the internet also holds a lot of opportunities for enlarging or maintaining social networks (Dooris et al, 2008;Ellison et al, 2007;Hargittai, 2008), for further identity development (McMillan and Morrisson, 2006;Moinian, 2006) and for social support (Dooris et al, 2008;Hlebec et al, 2006). In the same way, it offers opportunities for education too.…”