Contenu du sommaire : Classes populaires en ligne

Childminders caring for young children in their homes have no apparent reason to use the Internet in their work. Yet a survey conducted by means of interviews and systematic analysis of traces left online has shown sustained work-related uses of the Internet by childminders. This article explores those uses. Blogs, forums, Facebook accounts with various degrees of public visibility, and e-mails structure this professional group in a flexible way, opening up spaces that animate the daily life of the profession: exchanges of experience and expertise, solidarity between «isolated» colleagues, and self-learning. Educational standards that are supposed to be more «professionalized» are disseminated online, leading to the exclusion, either directly (through lack of access to accreditation) or indirectly (through market sanctions and the absence of clients), of childminders who do not adhere to them, at least not formally.

Based on a survey conducted by way of semi-structured interviews with young parents in Basse-Normandie, this article analyses the reasons that lead working class parents to use the Internet or not to search for information concerning their child(ren)'s health. Although the Internet has gradually become a reference medium in the health field, our findings showed relatively limited use, which moreover varies according to the respondents' educational and professional characteristics and gender. The fact that the Internet plays a smaller role in respondents' lives is explained in part by their tendency to go first to their physician, as well as by socially differentiated conceptions of health and by the primacy of television – the most prevalent of the media in the working classes. This analysis reveals significant differences between parents in the more affluent classes and those of the working classes, and between certain subsets within the «working class group», depending on their level of education.

Based on a corpus of fifty semi-structured interviews conducted among the working-class, this paper presents an analysis of perceptions and appropriations of «Diet / Physical Activity» self-quantification tools in low-income milieus. It shows limited use of self-tracking tools and, based on an examination of a «digital divide», highlights the factors leading to reluctance or adherence regarding the use of new self-quantification technologies. These technologies involve a relationship with food and time that is at odds with the taste for freedom found in working class milieus. The desire to escape from daily constraints causes respondents to steer clear of self-measurement approaches. Analysing the tension between the fears linked to tracking devices and hopes of empowerment, this article concludes with a description of those segments of the working class to which self-tracking tools are a means of emancipation.

Is Facebook used to develop social capital? This question is approached here on the basis of the practices of adolescents from working-class backgrounds, met during classroom interventions and individual interviews. The starting point was to consider the construction of social capital in the age of the Web, where a plethora of contents and relationships are accessible without being introduced by parents and without geographical constraints. Despite this utopian openness, we have seen that the entanglement of heterogeneous relationships, from the family to the «exes», and the publicity of interactions displayed on the wall lead to the risk of being «exposed». It actually encourages adolescents to foster strong ties more than casual encounters. Likewise, the contents shared on Facebook are homogenized in order to show one's bond with one's peers, and curiosity can only unfold if it is backed by a passion. The platform thus blocks the possibilities of exploration and experimentation that are necessary to adolescents, and instead confirms a social place, through affinities and the convergence of tastes.

Social media are an important tool for building reputations. Adolescents use them to assert themselves among their peers, while avoiding adult supervision. There is still very little research on Snapchat, yet it has become the favourite network of young people and the fear of education professionals. This network is characterized by the ephemerality of the content exchanged and by the invisibility of the community. Drawing on a five-month (n)ethnographic survey in four schools in Ile-de-France, I describe the uses that middle-school students make of this network and explain why young girls from working-class neighbourhoods expose themselves to more reputational risks in using it.

In recent years, due to the reduction of the digital divide in terms of equipment and connection costs, many Senegalese people are increasingly using the Internet. In a survey conducted in Dakar, we found that certain segments of the Senegalese working classes, including marabouts, street vendors and housekeepers, were using mobile Internet connections. These individuals have only recently started using this technology and, as they have never attended French school, they are socially and economically disadvantaged. This exploratory research therefore aims to shed light not only on their use of mobile Internet connections, but also on their appropriation of this technology through the use of WhatsApp.

Online video games are the place of exchange of digital objects useful to their exploration. Some players try to earn euros by selling the artificially rare objects they collect there. They can practice what they call “le farm”, playing in a very repetitive way to collect the most valuable objects. We propose a synthesis of research on the most widely publicized group among them, «goldfarmers»: low-skilled workers who operate in groups from distant countries in order to resell these objects on the Internet. An original study that we conducted with the French players of Dofus shows that they also practice “le farm”, but in a more individual way that earns little money and seeks mainly to obtain discounts to be able to carry on playing. This article shows how lucrative «farming» practices are organized and how all stakeholders manage, although not without friction, to live together on an online platform that was originally designed for gaming.

In this article, the author argues that the mediatization of the hashtags #metoo and #Balancetonporc, through which the public was made aware of the vigour of online feminist mobilization, is a manifestation of the recent emergence of a Fourth Wave of feminism in France. The term wave is used in the empirical sense, which makes its existence identifiable in relation to three measurable criteria, two of which are tested and validated. The first of the latter two criteria relates to the rise of public interest in topics linked to feminism or gender relations, and is verified in terms of Internet users' searches on the Web, as well as the topics debated at the National Assembly. The second criterion relates to a reconfiguration of militant ideas and/or practices. On this point, the role of the democratization of social media, from the restructuring of the cognitive market that they perform, to the regime of panoptical visibility characterizing them is examined.

This study compares two sets of short silent newsreel films made in 1925, drawn from different production contexts. The one set is Gaumont Actualités, a show created by Louis Gaumont in 1910, and is the product of a relatively standardized competitive and commercial activity aimed at the cinema's broad audience. The other is a private collection, Les Archives de la planète, funded by banker Albert Kahn between 1912 and 1931, which was compiled for knowledge purposes and, from the outset, was intended to be archived. The analysis is based on the study of about 700 films and some accounting archives. It describes the inevitable similarities between the two corpuses, as well as what constituted deviations from the standard commercial methods of the time.