Young people and communication technologies: Emerging challenges in generational analysis

Lim, S. S. (2015, May). Young people and communication technologies: Emerging challenges in generational analysis. Paper presented at the opening plenary of

the International Communication Association Annual Conference, San Juan, PR

We’ve all heard the terms “digital natives”, “thumb tribe” and “Generation Google”. Beyond the English-speaking world, similar generational labels abound.

In China, young people who are often referred to as "ditouzu", literally "the tribe that always keeps its heads lowered".

While in Vietnam, “sống ảo” is the label for young people who constantly post photographs or sensational status updates in a quest for ‘likes’ and social affirmation. Around the world therefore, there is no denying the appeal of snappy terms that seem to succinctly capture a particular generation’s socio-technical relationship with their media devices.

However, these are ultimately generationalisations (Driscoll & Gregg, 2008; McRobbie, 2004), that is, gross generalisations about how particular generations’ media practices are distinctive and run through every member of that generation. In the area of children, adolescents and the media, one of the most critiqued generationalisations is Mark Prensky’s ‘digital natives’:

Prensky claimed that digital natives have been surrounded by media devices their whole lives and consequently, “…It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume

of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.”

While such generationalisations tend to gain traction in the media and public consciousness, as well as to ignite moral panics, they are ultimately reductionist, lacking in nuance and assume homogeneity in generations of media consumers.

However, the inadequacies of generationalisations should not detract from the inherent value of taking a generational perspective in media studies. Indeed, previous research demonstrates how generational analysis can be valuable.

The “media generations” approach posits that different generations are marked by the media that they avidly use in their youth, and will consequently sustain a special connection with that medium for the rest of their lives. This approach has been used to chart divergences between different generations in terms of their media use patterns, exposure to media content, attitudes towards technology, and media literacy skills. Cohort analysis, such as those undertaken in technology domestication research, have studied how particular generations' life experiences, values and worldviews shape their communicative practices, and expectations of technology. An extensive range of studies has also analysed how generation interacts with other factors such as life stage, gender and prior experience in ICT to influence individuals' media use, for example, how they access, process and evaluate online information. Research that takes a generational analysis approach can thus usefully inform public education, policy planning, media production, interface design and parental mediation.

However, even as the generational approach to media studies can be illuminating, the rapid pace of change in our prevailing media landscape poses significant challenges for generational analysis. I will draw on examples from my media ethnographies of understudied populations to highlight three of these challenges.

The first challenge relates to how finely we should calibrate and delineate media generations, particularly with new waves of innovations being introduced and embraced at an accelerating pace.

My recent research on migrant students from Indonesia and Vietnam revealed some interesting distinctions in their media practices, even among young people who are only two to three years apart. Born between 1990 and 1995, all of my respondents would typically be grouped within the same generation. And yet, going by their communication practices, they could arguably belong two different media generations. The older group had ventured to Singapore for their university education three to four years ago, before smartphones and mobile social media had become such a mainstay. The younger group had emigrated to Singapore in the last two years, by which time mobile social media use had become more rampant and intense due to increased smartphone penetration. What were the implications of this distinction between the two groups? Notably, the younger students manifested a weaker instinct to acculturate to the host country and to fraternise with local students or those of other nationalities. Our findings suggest that this was primarily due to their pre-departure connections. Through online social connections, these students had already befriended co-nationals online before leaving their home countries, and after arriving in Singapore, immediately linked up with these contacts via their mobile social connections via apps such as WhatsApp, LINE and Facebook messenger. Ensconced in this ready network of co-national friends, the impetus to broaden their social networks and familiarise themselves with local culture was largely absent. While the phenomenon of migrants choosing to fraternise with co-nationals is not new, it has arguably been amplified by online social networking, thus impacting their long-term integration into their host country.

With regard to generational analysis of media use, this example reflects the breakneck pace at which new communication technologies emerge, diffuse and reach critical mass. Mobile social media such as WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat and Viber have seen explosive growth in the last two years, along with the dramatic rise in smartphone penetration in Southeast Asia. As media consumers hurtle from innovation to innovation in compact time windows, with seemingly rapid shifts in their communicative practices, researchers need to be sensitive to how finely we should demarcate ‘media generations’. We also need to be conscious of how responsive we are to these technological shifts, and find ways to reconcile in our research the more compressed technological timescale with the more long-drawn social timescale.

Related to the first challenge is the growing complexity of the media landscape, or what Nick Couldry refers to as the ‘media manifold’.

I’d like to share with you media maps that I ask my students to draw for me every semester. I ask them to capture how they communicate with significant people or entities in their lives such as their family, friends, hobby group mates, school, the state and so on. As you can see, theirs is a rambunctious multi-device, multi-platform, multi-app existence. In this map you can see the presence of Whatsapp, facebook, Skype, Oovoo, Twitter and in-game chats, an online learning platform, as well as email and phone calls.

And this one depicts multiple devices – phone, television, laptop, and a range of apps including Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Dropbox. Clearly, whereas labelling a cohort of media audiences as the ‘television generation’ was a relatively straightforward affair, characterising a particular generation by any specific medium today is an unwieldy and complicated task.

Compare these maps however to those of the at-risk youths whom I have been interviewing who are just a year younger than my students. The young people in this marginalised group did not manifest significantly poorer access to information and communication technologies. Indeed, most of them own the very latest smartphones out there.

However, because they were mostly school dropouts or undergoing vocational training , their uses of technology primarily centred around socialising and entertainment. They typically use the same phone apps all the time and even though they clearly have Internet access on their phones, do not use web browsers to engage in much exploration. Their online engagement was quite largely confined to the universe of social media apps they had downloaded. Taken together, all of these media maps also conceal a lot more than they reveal. At first glance, this generation of young people seems to use the same range of apps and devices. But each of them would have a personal signature in terms of the purpose, extent, nature, quality, intensity and depth of use of the entire plethora of apps and devices out there. So, are they the cloud generation? The app generation? Or the mobile generation?

As Goran Bolin and Oscar Westlund (2009) concluded from their study of three generations of mobile technology users in Sweden:

“it seems not very wise to argue for the label mobile technology generation, for the very simple reason that we do not really know if ‘mobile’ will be an intelligible concept in the near future. That we today speak of the ‘mobile,’ rather than the ‘mobile phone,’ as the device is so much more than a mobile telephone, is a case in point. With new technological development of powerful mobile devices that can be used for surfing the Web, accessing e-mails, chat services, news feeds and television and radio streaming, we are facing a situation where it might be hard to distinguish a mobile (phone) from a laptop computer.”

Nevertheless, as researchers, we need to strive to be pithy, even as we seek to avoid reductionism in characterising a media generation. And achieving these two objectives together in our rapidly evolving media landscape will be a significant challenge.

The third challenge relates to the domestic realm of media use. Research on children, adolescents and the media is often conducted in the family context, offering prescriptions on parental mediation and bridging intergenerational communication gaps.

These gaps are due in part to intergenerational differences in how communication technologies are used and interpreted. Yet these very technologies can also be harnessed as intergenerational bridges that can foster greater dialogue in the family. As researchers, we need to actively track the varied pace at which different generations of the family are adopting new communication technologies, and to chart the divergences that have to be bridged. At the same time, how can we be more attuned to new technologies that are more inclusive and can serve as sustainable intergenerational bridges?

Let me take you back to 2003, when I studied a group of young elderly parents and their communication with their children. Back then, we saw parents who were less adept with technology trying to learn how to use the computer and the internet to better connect with their children. When we asked one mother if she had considered learning from her children, she flashed a terrified look and said:

“I don’t want to learn from the children! ] I don’t want them to scold me. When I see how my son scolds his father when he teaches him how to use the computer, I get very scared. You know we old people are a bit forgetful sometimes. I don’t want him to scold me like that! I took up computer lessons in the mosque. It’s cheap - only $25 - and the people there are very very patient. They repeat over and over again until you understand.”

We were not particularly confident that her efforts would bear fruit because her use of the shared home computer was simply too infrequent for her to hone her skills.

In contrast, in a more recent study on communication between emerging adults and their young elderly parents, we were pleasantly surprised to find parents in their 60s actively communicating with their children via Facebook and WhatsApp using their smartphones and tablets. Unlike computers, these personally owned mobile devices are more user-friendly, with multi-language capabilities, thus requiring a lower skill threshold. Notably, this group of young elderly did not have much prior experience in computers or the internet, but had engaged in a form of

technological leapfrogging by heading straight for smartphones and tablets. Their communication with their children via these mobile devices offers a sustainable intergenerational bridge that we believe will reap dividends for some time to come.

So how can we as researchers respond to these three challenges I’ve highlighted? First, it is critical that we keep abreast of technological trends that have implications for how young people inform themselves, and how they communicate with their peers and their family. We also need to be alert to disruptive innovations that can entrench themselves very quickly, and with discernible impact on how people communicate. However, it is also crucial for us to steer clear of homogenisation. To do so, we should endeavour to chart salient media trends of different generations, while also casting our net wider and paying special attention to sub-populations that deviate from the norm. Finally of course, given the relentless pace of change in our current media landscape, we also need to constantly revisit our definitions of prevailing media generations in terms of temporal demarcations, dominant media practices and significant technological transitions.

In conclusion, I believe these tasks and challenges will energise us for many conferences and generations to come!

References

Bennett, S., & Maton, K. (2010). Beyond the ‘digital natives’ debate: Towards a more nuanced understanding of students' technology experiences. Journal Of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5), 321-331.

Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal Of Educational Technology, 39(5), 775-786.

Bolin, G., & Westlund, O. (2008). Mobile generations: The role of mobile technology in the shaping of Swedish media generations. International Journal of Communication, 3, 17.

Clark, L. S. (2009). Digital media and the generation gap: Qualitative research on US teens and their parents. Information, Communication & Society, 12(3), 388-407.

Couldry, N. (2011) The Necessary Future of the Audience … and how to Research it, in The Handbook of Media Audiences (ed V. Nightingale), Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK. doi: 10.1002/9781444340525.ch10

Driscoll, C., & Gregg, M. (2008). Broadcast yourself: moral panic, youth culture and internet studies. Youth Media In The Asia Pacific Region, 71-86.

Gumpert, G., & Cathcart, R. (1985). Media grammars, generations, and media gaps. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2(1), 23-35.

Helsper, E. (2010) Gendered internet use across generations and life stages. Communication research, 37 (3). pp. 352-374.DOI: 10.1177/0093650209356439.

Helsper, E. J., & Eynon, R. (2010). Digital natives: where is the evidence?. British educational research journal, 36(3), 503-520.

Jones, C., Ramanau, R., Cross, S., & Healing, G. (2010). Net generation or digital natives: is there a distinct new generation entering university?. Computers & Education, 54(3), 722-732.

Lim, S. S. (2006). From cultural to information revolution: ICT domestication by middle-class families in urban China. In M. Hartmann, T. Berker , Y. Punie & K. Ward (Eds.), Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead: Open University Press. 185-204.

Lim, S. S. & Soon, C. (2010). The influence of social and cultural factors on mothers' domestication of household ICTs - experiences of Chinese and Korean women. Telematics and Informatics, 27 (3), 205-216.

Lim, S. S. and Tan, Y. L. (2004) Parental Control of New Media Usage – The Challenges of Infocomm Illiteracy, Australian Journal of Communication, 31(1): 57-74.

Livingstone, S. M. (1992). The meaning of domestic technologies: A personal construct analysis of familial gender relations. In R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (Eds.) Consuming Technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces. (pp. 113-130). London: Routledge

Livingstone, S., & Helsper, E. (2007). Gradations in digital inclusion: Children, young people and the digital divide. New media & society, 9(4), 671-696.

Lugano, G., & Peltonen, P. (2012). Building Intergenerational Bridges between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants: Attitudes, Motivations and Appreciation for Old and New Media. In E. Loos, L. Haddon and E. Mante-Meijer (Eds.) Generational use of new media (pp.151-170). Surrey: Ashgate.

McRobbie, A. (2004). Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist media studies, 4(3), 255-264.

Oblinger, D. (2003). Boomers gen-xers millennials. EDUCAUSE review, 500(4), 37-47.

Oblinger, D. G. (2008). Growing up with Google. What it means to education. Emerging Technologies for Learning, 3, 11-29.

Oksman, V., & Turtiainen, J. (2004). Mobile communication as a social stage meanings of mobile communication in everyday life among teenagers in Finland. New Media & Society, 6(3), 319-339.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992). Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household. In R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (Eds.) Consuming Technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces (pp. 15-31). London: Routledge.