Inexperienced, Addicted, at Risk. How Young People Describe Their Parents’ Use of Digital Media

If we look at the relationship between young people and adults in terms of their usage of digital technologies, we can see that the studies conducted to date have paid little attention to adult users. Thanks to interviews and autoethnographic diaries, the present study looks at how young people view their parents’ use of digital media. A ‘mediologic approach’ help us to look at the inter-generational relationships and the role of digital technologies from the young people’s perspective, in an effort to shed light on those spaces in the discourse where expectations, stereotypes and generational boundaries are constructed. Young people’s views are on a continuum with a shared rhetoric that now sees digital media as an established element in our social ecology, but also as a phenomenon capable of modifying human behaviour. Young people’s narratives reveal an interesting picture: they worry about the older generation’s use of these technologies. The study shows how interviewees interiorized the rhetoric digital native vs. digital immigrants moving the focus from the technical plane to the social one and emphasizing a role for the young who can occupy an independent space, uninfluenced by the classical hierarchies.