Digital Young

Each month, at Radio Romania Cultural, I have a small contribution at Science in the right words show. I talk about the relationship between young people and the new information and communication technologies. I thought to start with some general things about that, why do young people use these technologies and a first effect of this use, already frequent, large and diverse. Therefore, one main observation was that young people start to use the ICTs from utilitarian and functional reasons, to make time more efficient, after which they get to another level, the use of ICTs from a need of autonomy and independence towards their parents in order to achieve a function strictly of socialization with peers. What determines them to continue? It’s something that also makes them specialize in using the ICTs, and that is the role played by play need. Almost in the case of all ICTs, we could outline a practice of playing, the object is even reappropriated if it doesn’t have this function primarily in its usage.

Now, an effect that I and other specialists observed when talking about the relationship between parents and teens which could be the retro-socialization, meaning that parents start to learn from their children how to use a certain technological object. This phenomenon we could see it in the case of a lot of parents and children; for example, I had a colleague who was around 45 years old. He was strongly against the idea of having a cell phone, thinking about his independence etc. His ideology of anti-appropriation had coherence and meaning. After three months, he bought himself a cell phone. He was always saying that it is just for emergency cases. After around four months, we I saw him again, he was already texting messages. The person who taught him how to use the mobile phone was his niece, 20 years old.

Parents do learn from their children how to function in this new cultural context. They cannot stay aside, because they need these informations and these technologies in various environments.

Now, everybody knows this guy. He’s Martin Cooper, the inventor of cell phone. And just another picture to show you the stages through which I passed having mobile phones:

I remember all of my cell phones. Those that I lost and hose that were stolen (in buses or at university). Steeling the other’s cell phone was almost a regular practice and people in Romania, in the late 90s, learned not to keep their phones outside of their pockets anymore, neither in a carrying case. When cell phone was still an expensive item and not a mass product, it was an exterior mark of financial success. Therefore, every person who had one made it very clear in the public space. It was an attraction for thieves. Two of my mobile phones got stolen: one during a class break, at the university, when I forgot my mobile in the seminar room, and the second time, in a very crowded bus, by some very skillful thieves. Today, everybody has a cell phone, which is described by the economic analysts as a mature market. Between Vodafone, Orange, Cosmote, Zapp and another competitor who announced its intentions in entering on mobile telephony segment, there will be a very strong competition. Not to make people buy mobile phones (as all almost have one), but the fight will be on value added services (Internet, fixed telephony etc).

But these are generalities. Regarding young people, the global trend of age decreasing when acquiring the first mobile phone is respected. In Bucharest mostly, kids of 9 or 10 years old have already a cell phone, but a “second hand” one, meaning that it was received from older persons (parents or brothers). Their “training” is done and realized with an old phone or not very fashionable. At that age, aspect and design is not that important.

Still, the need to have a mobile phone which is in trends and accordingly to their taste will overcome any parental restriction. Pre-teens (12-13 years) start to put money aside in order to buy themselves a new phone. The taste is constructed; their peers or the groups’ leaders have mobile phones which are different and through socialization, boys know that they want a masculine mobile phone and girls know that they want a feminine one. Older students are their role models regarding the images that they have about a mobile phone. From my research, I could outline a gender differentiated evolution in mobile phone practice; once they have a mobile phone, girls will buy (almost in all cases) the same brand. Why? Because, as they stated, they get familiar with that mark, meaning that the interior menu, the display of keys (knowing that all graphic signs are in their right place) determine them to buy a mobile (an advanced one) from the same brand. In opposition, boys get more exploratory; they like to change also the brand, to compare, to see which has a greater capacity, which has more functionalities etc. Therefore, choosing and having a mobile phone at teens becomes a very complicated process. But I will continue in another post with why do teens and young people use cell phone rather than another technological object.

Maybe you can tell me more about how you use your mobile phone or what happy or unhappy experiences you had with it. Share your knowledge here and we can comment about it.

The Internet network appeared in Romania around 1995 as a way to communicate between several friends. After their appearance, the logics of communication transgressed into an usage logics totally different of that one which has been imposed by the technical macro-system. Really fast, these networks extended very much in all the neighborhood, becoming local networks with a specific identity. Even if the market was open for big and little national and international societies who provide Internet, the battle is won by the little neighborhood networks. I put myself the question how to explain this phenomenon? I did a research in Bucharest during one year. I could observe that these networks offered a social virtual space in which the individual is feeling more relaxed in the communication and in the exchange of informations than in the space of a big network.

For about five year, the user of the local network has acquired a specific logics of practices which led him to re-appropriate the logics proved by the center of control and of power by the big system. This process of re-appropriation is a specific way to use the technical object, an appropriation which transforms him into a master of his uses and a manager of network and user of stocked informations. Inside of this network, each user (in spite of a social status in the real society) brings here everything he has (music, films, games etc) in order to share these stocked informations with the others. It resulted that the motivations who make users to remain in this network are of a functional nature, but also a symbolic one, in the way that they want to integrate in a virtual world of share, of gift and of redistribution: the new virtual identity acquired by his nickname gives him a new image of himself, liberated by the authority of social world (family, peer group, school, work etc).

I could see here the emergence of a virtual equal society whose principles and the practices are easily appropriated by users with a shared purpose: transgressing the real structured society by virtual community practices (virtual conviviality and the valorization of self). This virtual society becomes a parallel form of social organization as a wedge who resists to determinists pressures from the macro system.

In conclusion, the space of my research puts in evidence a spontaneous tendency of a social equal organization that the technical system facilitates in spite of internal logics.