Digital Literacy Circulation: Adolescents and Flows of Knowledge about New Media

The aim of this paper is to discuss the output of an empirical research on digital skills in order to develop a typology of skills circulation among young digital users. Relying on research on digital literacy in media studies and on users in STS, in this article we start criticizing the concepts of \u201cdigital divide\u201d, \u201cdigital inequalities\u201d and \u201cdigital competencies\u201d. Then, we present the principal results of a research study involving 50 adolescents in Italy about how they acquired their competences in the use of digital media. This gave us the opportunity to focus on the digital skills of young people and the development of their abilities in using digital media. The research outlines the patterns of circulation in digital competences among young people in relation to family, school and peer group, defining four kinds of \u201cflows\u201d: parental flow (involving fathers and mothers), peer flow (connected to friends and people of the same age), educational flow (referring to formal education) and technological flow (involving technological devices, such as computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc.). The aim is to understand the interactions between digital skills and the social, institutional and technological conditions that influence the youth\u2019s digital literacy for the everyday use of digital media

The bodies of the (digitized) body: Experiences of sexual(ised) work on OnlyFans

OnlyFans has enjoyed increasing attention from media and from users and consumers, especially since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and particularly amongst Internet-savy emerging adults. We used semi-structured interviews to collect testimonies from young Italian women (N = 20) who sell their own sexual(ised) content on OnlyFans and processed them through Th ematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Through this process, we sought to explore how different bodies are conceptualised in relation to content production, and how labour takes somatic existence in multiple ways. We looked at 1) how the body is prepared to be presented and mediatised, 2) how its presentation is conceptualised and actualised, and 3) how that work of representation, as a work of networking and therefore where bodily energy is invested and expended. Through this, we show how there are multiple, concurrent, and at times contradictory, narratives about corporality, and that potency and healing coexist alongside exhaustion

Il volto digitale di eros, agape e philia. Adolescenti, amore e sessualità nella "grande rete"

Adolescents and youth are big consumers of the internet. Today, what we call online social media, such as social network sites (SNS), blogs, etc. are an important part of young people's life (Pujazon-zazik, Park 2010). Youth are increasingly utilizing these communicative tools to support or to enhance their "offline" relations (Subrahmanyam, Greenfield, 2008; Livingstone 2010). The author's research focuses on a field that is very much neglected by the Italian sociological studies, aiming to understand the current state of the youth culture in relationship to the internet and sexuality. The work seeks to understand how young italians today use the internet to gain and access information (visual images, discussions, discourses) about sexual and intimate life and activities; to understand 'how' and 'why' they use (or choose not to use) this particular medium, and what kind of social impact can be observed in this relatively new phenomenon. The research seek (1) to understand what multimedia platform young Italian use to have access to information and discourses connected to sexuality; (2) to understand why they use (or don't use) this media; (3) to define the extent of Internet on the youth's experience on sexuality and their social construction; (4) to understand the definition of previously points to eventually rough out differences between boys and girls understanding how gender difference could be constructed in the Internet. Everything avoiding to the oversimplifying labels of the Internet as either an entirely dangerous or entirely safe space . With this research, the author wants to draw an attention to the problematic relationships between the "real" and "virtual", between the everyday life experience that contain also what someone define "virtual" life experience, an experience mediated by the social and cognitive space where the absence of the body plays a paradoxical roll in their (self-learning) education of sexuality and construction of identity. The research is based on a qualitative approach and, more specifically, on participatory approach with focus groups, interviews and on-line focus groups with adolescents from 16 years old to 18 years old. The main results of the research show an interesting panorama where the Internet goes to be integrated into everyday life with the classic agents of socialization (School, family, friends) in different ways depending on the dialogue that in the other places is permitted to adolescents. For the interviewed the Internet becomes important because it allows to cope with embarrassment, fear of the "firsts times" (first sexual intercourse, first kiss, etc.), curiosity, etc. Internet, overall with SNS, becomes an important part of the construction of identity of adolescents that with online resources try to "play" and define which Erving Goffman (1963) called social identity and personal identity. Everything goes to a specific direction: what the girls and the boys interviewed define "normality": a standardized idea of the gender roles and of the identity, something that "jump" in the "online" and "offline" spaces as a unique region without borders

Fra i banchi di... casa.Il punto di vista dei giovani sulla didattica a distanza nei giorni dellockdown. Among the school desks... at home.The point of view of youths on distance learning during the lockdown.

Abstract La pandemia ha portato alla ridefinizione di alcune modalità tipiche della cultura scolastica, sia da parte degli insegnanti che da parte degli studenti. In questa situazione sono emerse nuove pratiche, nuovi modi di fare didattica e allo stesso tempo nuove forme di sottrazione – o ‘resistenza’ – da parte degli studenti che hanno prodotto forme ‘altre’ di cultura digitale, scolastica e universitaria. Obiettivo della ricerca che qui presentiamo è quello di indagare quanto – e soprattutto come - sono cambiate, rispetto al periodo precedente alla pandemia generata dal Covid-19, le routine degli studenti e delle studentesse della scuola di secondo grado e dell’università, considerando, in particolar modo, il ruolo dei media digitali all’interno di queste dinamiche. Il principale strumento utilizzato è stato l’intervista, somministrata a quaranta ragazze e ragazzi delle scuole secondarie di secondo grado e dell’università, residenti in differenti regioni d’Italia. Le interviste hanno fatto emergere come, grazie ai media digitali, durante i periodi di pandemia ragazze e ragazzi abbiano usato una serie di tattiche di resistenza e ri-significazione degli spazi domestici, al fine di rispondere a una situazione inedita e inaspettata.Abstract The pandemic brought to the re-definition of some of the typical modalities of the scholar culture, both from the educators’ and the students’ points of view. In this situation emerged some new practices, new ways of teaching, and at the same time new forms of subtraction – or ‘resistance’ – from the students’ side, which created ‘unusual’ forms of digital scholastic and academic culture. The aim of this research is to investigate how much – and in particular how – the daily routine of the second grade and university students changed, compared to the previous phase of Covid-19, evaluating in particular the role of digital media inside these dynamics. The main tool used has been the interview, hand out to forty boys and girls from secondary and university degree, leaving in different Italian regions. The interviews arose that thanks to digital media, during the pandemic periods, boys and girls used several strategies such as resistance and re-signification of domestic spaces, aiming at responding to a previously unknown and unexpected situation

Chapter Editors' Introduction

This edited collection brings together original empirical and theoretical insights into the complex set of relations which exist between age, gender, sexualities and the media in Europe. This book investigates how engagements with media reflect people’s constructions and understandings of gender in society, as well as articulations of age in relation to gender and sexuality; the ways in which negotiations of gender and sexuality inform people’s practices with media, and not least how mediated representations may reinforce or challenge social hierarchies based in differences of gender, sexual orientation and age. In doing so, it showcases new and innovative research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. Including contributions from both established and early career scholars across Europe, it engages with a wide range of hotly debated topics within the context of gender, sexuality and the media, informing academic, public and policy agendas.This collection will be of interest to students and researchers in gender studies, media studies, film and television, cultural studies, sexuality, ageing, sociology and education

Adolescents, digital media and romantic relationship

Summary. Digital media are an important part of adolescents' everyday life who use these platforms not only to increase their knowledge, but also to enlarge their social network that they construct outside digital spaces. Through the social network sites and the mobile media, the internet becomes the place where to speak about emotions, to play with them, to write about ourselves, to flirt, to define and redefine the seduction practices and the expectatives about the others: a potential partner or a friend. This paper presents and discusses the results of a sociological research. The work involved fifty-eight Italian boys and girls from the age of sixteen to the age of eighteen. Passing through the digital and fiscal spaces with the help of the youth who took part in my research I tried to explore the role of the digital media in the online and offline dynamics connected to affectivity and love