Cyber-Relations in the Field of Home Computer Use for Leisure: Bourdieu and Teenage Technological Experts

Abstract

This article highlights the practice of a group of New Zealand teenagers who are considered by their family and themselves to be technological experts. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's key concepts of habitus, field and capital, this text identifies and discusses the cyber-relations that constitute the practice in the field of home computer use for leisure. The purpose of this article is to claim that though this field is predominantly a field of leisure, these are valid sites of informal learning. As almost all of the experts in the study gained their expertise through independent means, with minimal input from their schooling, discussion focuses on what these informal trajectories to technological expertise might mean for pedagogy and formal learning within schools.