The Relationship Between Youth and Digital Culture Probed

A new thesis explores the relationship between Internet and today's youth, and how they learn and socialise through new technologies. Sociologist Lucía Merino at the University of the Basque Country emphasised that the digital generation takes new technologies as something natural and use them intuitively.

Thanks to this relationship of normality, young people have, moreover, developed skills that previous generations lacked, such as greater visual intelligence, taste for hypertextuality or the non-lineal access to information, immediacy or greater ability to solve problems without the need to consult a manual.

According to the study, this represents great symbolic satisfaction for young people, and they themselves accept practices on the Internet where they can see and be seen.

The thesis also highlights creative appropriation: they are able to interpret, use and apply these technologies for a function different to that for which they were created in principle, and they are aware of this.

The author states that this skill should be understood as a source of social innovation. These young people are known as leading users, and it should be remembered that, given the skills they display compared to those of their antecedents, a generation gap could be opening up.

Source-ANI