Digital media are increasingly becoming embedded in young people’s everyday life, producing new time-spaces for their self-expressions, connectivity and ‘self-creation’. These youths have been described as digital natives, an object of gaze not just among media scholars but also government bodies, educationists, business people, librarians, advertisers, broadcasters and electronic media technologists, and not only in the west but also in the rest. However, the concept of digital natives has been criticised as being essentialist, technologically deterministic and western-centered. To add to the difficulties, the concept of digital natives has been infracted through various geographical, cultural and social contexts.
The Global Digital Youth project is an interdisciplinary academic collaborative project among Department of Communication and Media Studies at the Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Department of Education at the University of Oxford in UK and Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard University in USA.
What do children and young people across different places share and to what extent do they connect across language and cultural barriers?
What kind of attributes and experiences do they share in the way they interact with media and information communication technologies (ICT), information itself, with each other, and other people and institutions?
Addressing the issue of the cultural specificities and commonalities between Western and non-Western youth culture, we believe this cross-cultural approach offers a significant understanding of digital media, and issues of interconnectivity in the global age. Children and young people create and recreate their self-identity, community and culture in the new time-spaces produced with digital media.