Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ARGENTINA: Multimedia Youngsters not Isolated

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 19 2008 (IPS) - Many parents in Argentina, like their counterparts in developed countries, worry that their teenage children spend too much time on their computers and cell-phones, with little real-life interaction with others, and devoting hardly any time to reading. But a new study shows that such beliefs are partly based on preconceived notions that do not stand up to scrutiny.

“Knocking down these myths was one of the aims of our study,” Roxana Morduchowicz, director of the Argentine Education Ministry’s National School and Media Programme, told IPS.

Morduchowicz’s study, “La generación multimedia. Significados, consumos y prácticas culturales de los jóvenes” (The Multimedia Generation: Meanings, Consumption Patterns and Cultural Practices of the Young), takes a close look at how today’s new media shape the identities of young people.

The results are not only useful for marketers catering to young people, but to parents and public policy-makers as well, said the author, who holds a PhD. in communications.

“In our survey, we found that four out of 10 young respondents had not gone to the movies in the last year, so we launched the programme ‘school and films’ to bring the movies to them,” said Morduchowicz, to illustrate the role the state can play in fomenting access to communications products.

Another programme that got underway this year involves the free distribution of the magazine “Re” in public secondary schools. The publication contains a selection of articles that have been published in newspapers and magazines, in areas of interest to young people, like sports, music, new technologies and ecology.


Based on a survey among adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17 in cities around the country, the study, which was published in book form in April, shows that the latest technologies, like computers, cell-phones and iPods (portable media players), “do not necessarily conspire against reading,” and that far from isolating youngsters, they have become “the pillars of new forms of socialising.”

“Kids do read very little,” said the author. “Sixty-five percent of the respondents said they read between one and three books (not including textbooks) a year.”

But, she added, spending less time in front of the computer screen did not mean they would read more. “Adolescents who read the most are also the ones who make the most varied use of computers,” she noted.

Morduchowicz’s study also showed that the new communications technologies have not replaced the old media, like TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, but instead complement and overlap them.

Under the bewildered gaze of many parents, adolescents today use different media technologies simultaneously, integrating all of them, she said.

As a result, teenagers spend an average of six hours a day with the different kinds of media, and seven and a half in the case of youngsters from middle and upper-income sectors.

Only 20 percent of the respondents said they used the different media one at a time. A typical scenario would be a teenager chatting over the Internet with one or more people while listening to music, text messaging on the cell-phone and searching for information on the Web.

These situations frequently lead to surprise or scepticism among parents, who find it hard to believe their children’s claims that they are doing homework under such conditions.

“We are looking at a multimedia generation, the first that has been born in an extremely diversified media environment that includes AM/FM radio, cable TV, video games, VCRs, DVDs, iPods, MP3s and the Internet,” said the author.

The trend extends to sectors of urban society with less access to the new technologies as well, she added. “The fact that young people from lower-income strata often do not have computers at home doesn’t mean they don’t use them,” she said.

In middle and upper-income families, youngsters use computers for instant messaging, playing games and listening to music, as well as to run Web searches and do homework.

But among lower-income sectors, computers are used mainly for instant messaging and playing games.

One of the myths that the book undermines is that members of the multimedia generation are isolated. Indeed, 65 percent of the youngsters surveyed for the study said they used computers “to chat.”

With regard to cell-phones, 55 percent of the 15 to 17-year-olds said they had one, and 90 percent of these said they used it to communicate with their friends via text messaging.

The potential effect of loneliness and solitude that is often attributed to the new media is far from proven, says the study, which points out that for today’s young people, the new technologies are a means of gaining autonomy from the family in terms of social relationships with friends.

Instant messaging, for example, offers a channel for sharing secrets and talking about private matters that are often harder to discuss face to face, says the study, which adds that “even though the use is individual, the function is basically a social one: interacting with others.”

The author noted, however, that when given the choice, a large majority of respondents (65 percent) said that going out with friends was the most fun, while TV, the radio and reading, seen as alternatives only for “boring days,” all took a back seat to the new technologies.

Morduchowicz said Argentina is in line with global trends. “The behaviours are the same; the only difference with Europe is in the level of access to the new media,” she said.

In industrialised countries, a larger proportion of the population has access to the new technologies.

But another of the study’s findings is that even in lower-income urban neighbourhoods, today’s youngsters are using the new technologies, in cybercafés, even if their families cannot afford to buy their own equipment.

“In Argentina, approximately 30 percent of (urban) youngsters have a computer in their homes, but more than 80 percent use them regularly,” said the author.

She also said the media have become a “private” affair in today’s households. In higher-income families, children often have their own TV sets and computers, which allows them to use them in privacy, away from parental oversight.

 
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