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Bourdieu's sociological concepts and approach are well suited to capture and interpret the new phenomena of the information society. The present paper shows how these concepts and notions have been applied in recent literature, both theoretically and empirically. We focus on the notion of digital capital, which is considered a new factor in the process of Bourdieu's cultural reproduction concept. Thus our starting point is that status in digital inequalities, and thus digital capital, plays a significant role in determining educational inequalities and school performance. We illustrate this hypothesis by analysing data of PISA 2015 from Hungary, namely the impact of different dimensions of ICT use on test scores in mathematics, reading literacy and science. Our results suggest that digital capital plays a crucial role in shaping educational inequalities, but that the effects vary across dimensions of digital inequalities and ICT use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The students of today have mostly grown up surrounded by numerous digital technologies, like cell-phones, computers and the internet; therefore they are called digital natives by some scholars. These information and communication technologies are indispensable parts of their lives. The digital gaps which are caused by the (different) use of digital technologies are socially relevant primarily in school, as they influence the inequalities in education. In our article, we present the possible approaches of digital inequalities in school, the gap between teachers and students and the differences among students. We introduce the concepts and theories about the digital natives then sum up the main criticism about this thesis. Recent empirical studies and their results are presented to argue in favour of the heterogeneity of the digital native’s generation.

The aim of our article is to analyse the generational differences of ICT access and utilization by presenting the first results of a recent sociological research which was carried out with four different age groups at the beginning of 2012. The paper focuses on the similarities and differences of ICT (computer, internet and mobile phone) access and use of the generations. First of all, we provide the theoretical framework of the analysis by introducing the definitions and literature of the ‘digital gap’, the ‘digital inequalities’ and the ‘digital natives’. In addition to the discussion of the mostly descriptive results of the research, we follow the concepts of digital gap and digital inequalities by first showing the differences of ICT access, then that of some other aspects of ICT use – the place, the autonomy, the intensity and the aim of use – between the generations. As far as the differences in access are concerned, the socio-economic characteristics of users and non-users are considered. The analysis confirms that ICT access and use differences correspond to the generational discrepancies. On the one hand the results show that the most typical characteristic of non-users is their high age. On the other hand we have found that even the members of the young generation – the so-called digital natives – constitute a rather heterogenic population in regard of the different dimensions of ICT use. Further analysis is needed and planned in order to reveal the causal relations behind the results found.