YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

328 studies show that they significantly determine levels of involvement in the labour market and career success (European Commission, 2020), as well academic performance (Pagani et al., 2016). In this chapter, we dis- cuss in more detail three areas that are crucial for young people’s full involvement in the networked society of global capitalism. These are the digital divide, digital competencies, and young people’s involvement in current social processes through new communication networks. 10.2  INTERNET ACCESS AND DIGITAL LITERACY The digital divide has traditionally been shown and tested in the light of access to the internet, ICT, and in the context of associated knowledge (Heeks, 2018: 131). Thus, the literature has often featured discussion of so- called digital poverty, as well as important questions about access to the internet as a fundamental human right (ibid.: 134). With the development of the internet and the advancement of ICT, the analysis of the digital di- vide has increasingly highlighted several different dimensions of this phe- nomenon. These range from the mobility gap, which characterized access tomobile telephony, to the broadband gap associated with the technology of the same name. The gap, which is caused by various factors (e.g. income, gender, education, age, nationality, disability, settlement), has also begun to be analysed inmore detail. Although young people are proverbially con- sidered digital natives, these factors still have a significant impact on their access to the internet and further on the effects of its use. Nevertheless, based on available statistics from Eurostat, we can conclude that young people have relatively good access to the internet, both in terms of young people within the EU and in terms of the general population. In Slovenia, access to computers and the internet is high and is comparable to other EU countries (see Figure 15.3 in the appendix). On the other hand, the share of daily internet users among young people is at the bottom of the EU aver- age, but at the same time it is evident that the share of young people in Slovenia does not lag significantly behind the most ranked countries, as namely youth access to the internet in Slovenia is well over 90%. Especial- ly in comparisonwith the rest of the population, the difference in favour of young people in our country is among the largest (see Figure 10.1).