Introduction

The vast array of risks and opportunities that confront children in their daily media practices cannot be analysed in isolation from the broader context in which these practices emerge and become meaningful. Previous research (Livingstone and Helsper, 2007, 2009) indicates that the patterns and social contexts of general internet use are key factors shaping children's online activities and their exposure to risks.

In the EU Kids Online project, the institutional, social and cultural environment co-determining the quality of online experience has been analysed from the perspective of children's everyday lives (Livingstone et al, 2011). Online experience is defined as a pathway composed of the online activities engaged in by children, the online and offline factors that shape the safety of online environments and their harmful and beneficial outcomes.

This chapter focuses on the first step along this path, and analyses the increasing variety of internet access and use experienced by children in Europe. Locations, platforms, experience and the embeddedness of the internet in everyday life are accounted for in order to provide a full picture of the first and the most immediate sociocultural layer in which children's agency is exercised. Insofar as individuals’ use of technologies is socially shaped within family and peer relations (Haddon, 2004), this chapter investigates the relationship between place of access, online experience and frequency of use of the internet, within the family’s wider technological culture. It examines cross-national variations in patterns of usage and provides a classification of countries.

Emerging trends and cross-national variations

‘Thinking holistically’ (Haddon, 2003) seems to be one of the most noticeable trends in recent research on media practices. Media are no longer investigated in their individual textuality or as clusters of isolated material practices, but rather as the constituents in an ‘ecology’ (Ito et al, 2009), that is, as ‘an overall technical, social, cultural and place-based system, in which the components are not decomposable or separable’ (Ito et al, 2009, p 31).

‘Media ecologies’ are place- and time-based systems that can be studied from the viewpoint of the temporal and spatial coordinates in which they are rooted. This point is developed thoroughly in the domestication approach (Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992), whose theoretical and empirical insights constitute the framework for the analysis in this chapter.