Online Cultural Participation in Italy. The Role of Digital Media Across Generations

The growing usage of digital technologies is reshaping the way individuals interact with culture, increasing the volume, accessibility and diversity of cultural participation. Although the Internet and digital media make cultural participation easier and more direct, there is also evidence that digital technologies reproduce existing inequalities characteristic of offline cultural participation, which tends to vary considerably with people’s education, social position, geographic location and age cohort. Indeed, we cannot deny a certain correspondence between age cohorts and media usage practices. Adopting a generational cohort approach, the present chapter intends to investigate online cultural practices of members of different cohorts co-present in Italy in order to focus on inter-generational and intra-generational relationships. To explore this topic, we examine data on online cultural participation collected by the Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT) within the 2015 edition of Leisure Time Survey-LTS (I cittadini e il tempo libero). We use multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to provide key insights on relationships between categories. Our findings suggest that in Italy, digital media are vehicles of a wider, more diverse and democratic cultural participation among generation cohorts under certain conditions. While the results confirm that digital media open up access to, and participation in a number of cultural activities, they also show that engagement with online cultural practices remains mostly limited to individuals with the motivations and abilities to enjoy the opportunities provided by a digitized society.