Young people connected. Young people's experiences with new technologies

Abstract

Today, new technologies are not a new topic for the scientific community. The importance of the phenomenon has generated a considerable volume of researches, focused, basically, on the quantitative study of their utilization. Nevertheless, and in spite of the studies carried out, there are still important lagoons of knowledge. In this note we approach what we consider as one of such lagoons: the qualitative analysis of the relationship between young people and new technologies. In this sense, we present some of the main results coming from the research about the influence of new technologies on young people’s daily life; a study which objective was to analyze, not only the availability and use of certain technologies (particularly, computers, Internet, mobile phones and videogames), but, fundamentally, how these technologies join to young people’s daily life and how this social group perceives the relationship with them. Therefore, we are interested, not only in the possible changes in the way young people and teenagers study, have fun or mix with family members or friends, but also we analyse how this changes are explained and interpreted.