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Consumers, participants, and creators: young people's diverse use of television and new media

Published:01 April 2007Publication History
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Abstract

With the ever-changing and ubiquitous media environment as a backdrop, this article analyzes how young people respond to television and new media and how media is used in their everyday lives, in their social relations, and in building an identity. The analysis is based on findings from a user study of 10 to15 year-olds in Norway. The respondents were recruited among active Internet users, and since they were early adopters of new technology, they can be considered a vanguard. Starting with a broad outline of some essential earlier studies on young people's use of media in Europe and in the United States, the results of this study are presented and ideas for further development are discussed. Media, and in particular visual and social media, play an increasingly important role in young people's lives. But a shift is about to happen in their relationship to the media; from being an audience and users to becoming participants and creators as well. This article is a contribution to the previous rather poor research on these ongoing changes.

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  1. Consumers, participants, and creators: young people's diverse use of television and new media

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        Amos O Olagunju

        Youngsters are rapidly shifting roles, from consumers of media and technology to partakers and inventors of new social and educational technology applications. Teenagers, indiscriminate of gender, often use visual and social media to build relationships and self identity. The distinctive characteristics of the new generation of teens should be used to target educationally entertaining experiences to augment learning via interactive digital TV [1]. But how are young boys and girls different in their preferences for educational TV entertainment programs__?__ Svoen reports on research investigations into diverse uses of TV and news media by adolescents?as consumers, contributors, and architects of educational materials. A nonrepresentative large sample of adolescents in Norway as surveyed online; follow-up interviews were conducted with a small focus group. The majority of the participants had access to a mobile phone, a television, a computer, the Internet, and a DVD/video player. The online survey results revealed that boys barely accessed the Internet more, but substantially used computers more than girls. The adolescents in the study favored watching films on DVD/video over going to movie theaters. The multitasking participants acquired pleasure from combining online chatting, playing computer games or music, and watching TV with reading and homework. However, the boys and girls differed in their enjoyment of the types of computerized and simulation games. The boys preferred computers as a substitute for the TV, while the girls indicated no partiality for mobile phones and computers. The subjects expressed appreciation for precise and fast Internet access to digital games, music, and information in vast databases. The survey results undeniably show that adolescents are capable of using technology to produce and exhibit novel artistic, educational, and social multimedia application materials. The findings in the research study are timely, vital, and useful for creating gender-based educationally entertaining materials, accessible via the Internet and interactive digital televisions. Online Computing Reviews Service

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        • Published in

          cover image Computers in Entertainment
          Computers in Entertainment   Volume 5, Issue 2
          Interactive TV
          April/June 2007
          156 pages
          EISSN:1544-3574
          DOI:10.1145/1279540
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2007 ACM

          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 1 April 2007
          • Revised: 1 July 2006
          • Received: 1 July 2006
          • Accepted: 1 July 2006

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