One of the presentations at the Cinekid seminars introduced the findings from the Belgian research group Mediappro about media usage among 12 to 18 years old. Their main question is “how to put more civilization into the new virtual networks”.
According to these findings the next generation of Internet users will be oriented towards mobile technologies (iPods, videocameras, cell phones etc), will educate itself through practice, will tend to ignore school and parents and learn from “peers”, lack the notion of “author”, often recurring to copy&paste, but on the other hand have a very developed notion of “responsibility”, they prefer to write short messages than talk, they express themselves in blogs and social networks, they are nice (!).
I found particularly interesting the point that schools promote computer literacy for children but not for parents, and, because of this, parents have to consider the children as “experts” with regards to the Internet and lose much authority that could be very useful when children are faced with moral issues online.
Also, I wondered, is this going to be the first generation whose communication skills will not be understood by their parents? WIll this affect irremediably the parents-sons relationships? And how much will this influence the development of really different/autonomous values?