Koolinoored autorina internetikeskkonnas

Date

2006

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

Description

Key words: young people, the Internet, age and gender differences, interactive media use, content creation and participation. Many schoolchildren use the Internet for different activities: to play, to communicate, to learn. The Internet is a new communication channel, which also enables the users to be creative and to publish all kind of material (text, files, photos, webpage). This work is important because it studies how actively young people take part of creative activities in the cyberspace. Almost all schoolchildren have an access to the Internet (at school or at home), but it is not exactly known how much they use it for self-expression. The purpose of this work is to research which activities young people prefer on the Internet. Some activities (for example weblogs, online-commenting, etc.) assumes that the user creates something before he or she shares it with others. So anyone has an opportunity to become an author on the Internet. The empirical material of the study is based on the results of the questionnaire „Pupil and the Media 2005“. The author focused on the questions about the activities on the Internet. The main results of this study are: • Estonian schoolchildren are versatile users of the Internet. The most popular activities among young people are sending e-mails (85%), downloading files (82%), seeking for information (75%), communication in the chatrooms/forums (73%) and uploading photos (70%). • Much less schoolchildren use the opportunities to express themselves through the weblogs (25%), personal homepages (23%) or uploading poems and stories that they have written (18%). So young people prefer activities where it is not needed to be very creative. • A comparison of boys’ and girls’ interactive use of new media showed that girls use more activities, which assume creating something before sharing it with others. For example, less boys have their own weblog. It is also interesting that boys and girls make their homepages equally. So there are no gender differences in activities that require more advanced computer skills. • Younger children use more opportunities to express themselves on the Internet. The results showed that children between 11-12 years are the most active users of the Internet. However, schoolchildren between 17-18 years do not use the opportunities to create the content on the Internet so actively. One alternative possibility to expand this research is to make qualitative interviews with pupils to find out their motives to produce the content on the Internet. Creative Internet usage is a very interesting research object and there are many standpoints to deal with this topic. This work raised several questions for future research.

Keywords

H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd, noored, uus meedia, Internet

Citation