The Children of Mixed Couples in the Postdigital Age: When Digital and Intercultural Competences Come Together

Starting with the concept of “Digital Educational Poverty”, the study focuses on digital competences and differences based on socioeconomic factors using the Depend tool (Digital Educational Poverty in Educative Networking and Development). This tool was tested in the Digital Connections project (2021-2024), involving 6.598 second-year middle school students. The concept of digital educational poverty stems from the hybridization of two perspectives in defining digital competence: the “Rights” perspective and that of “New literacies”, which focuses on the dynamism and transdisciplinarity of competencies. Through the survey of the Digital Competence Score submitted in 2022-23, it emerges that the results of children of mixed couples (6.20% of the total) surpass those of children with both parents born abroad (11.65%) and those with both parents born in Italy (82.15%). Using the concepts of “cultural capital” and “intercultural capital,” the article theorizes that these better results can be explained by the fact that both digital competences and intercultural competences are characterized by dynamism, contextualization, and a collective component.