ABSTRACT
Research on children’s engagements with digital media can sometimes assume that particular children’s uses of digital media are representative of all children’s digital literacy practices in some kind of loose way, thought of as being more the same as each other than adults are like each other. The children had no access to a personal computer, laptop or iPad at all as these were not affordable items for their parents or their neighbours. The chapter shows the ‘tradeability’ of digital resources again in the troubled efforts to provide a ‘paperless school’ environment in another region of South Africa. The children of professionals are seen to absorb the cultural capital that English-language resources, digital hardware, and unlimited broadband Internet connectivity in their homes afforded them by way of connections to global middle-class cultural flows. The conditions of play were also constrained by the limited space available in the home, as well as the parents’ attitudes to children’s noise.
