Smartphone pervasiveness in youth daily life as a new form of digital inequality

In recent years, smartphones have become the most popular and ubiquitous tool for adolescents to access the internet in developed countries. However, the pervasiveness of this device, even in the most relevant moments of the day, has raised some concerns about its confinement capabilities. In this paper we test the hypothesis that smartphone pervasiveness in adolescents’ daily life represents a new source of digital and social inequality on the entire high-school student population of Valle D’Aosta region, in Northern Italy (N=4,675). By means of a mediation analysis, we show how smartphone pervasiveness mediates the relationship existing between students’ social origins, measured though their parents’ educational level, and school performance, thus contributing to deepening the academic polarisation between high- and low-performing students.