The experience of youth in the digital age

Abstract

Current research and practice suggest that ICT has fundamentally impacted on the experience of youth across the globe. From a theoretical perspective there is a critical engagement with binary frames of reference, such as private/public, real/virtual and positive/negative to describe the impact of ICT on the experience of youth. In the process of engaging critically with these notions, there is an increasing, interest in understanding the relationship between new media, ICT and young people’s everyday lived experience. The rise of ICT in everyday life has also sparked a transformation in empirical approaches to research whereby the internet is now understood as a new, though not separate, setting in which research can explore identity production and relationships and online activities that supplement or reinforce, rather than replace, offline activities across a range of social, cultural and political domains. At the same time, the literature indicates that future research must consider both the new opportunities created by ICT, as well as the enduring (offline) structures that shape different dimensions of the experience of youth