Mediated childhoods : a comparative approach to young people’s changing media environment in Europe

This Special Issue presents work-in-progress from a substantial cross-national project investigating the diffusion and significance of media and information technologies among young people aged 6-17 years old living in twelve European countries Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. As described in this article, the project has brought together multidisciplinary teams to develop a common conceptual and methodological framework with which to explore cultural variations in media use. This framework stresses the importance of first, contextualising ‘new’ media in relation to both pre-existing media practices and the broader contexts of young people’s lives, second, of drawing on and contributing to the integration of childhood, youth and media studies, and third, of theorising contexts of media use in relation to processes of modernisation. Thus we link young people’s media uses to the shifting boundary between public and private, the changing relation between social determination and individualisation of the life world, and processes of globalization and consumerism. This article also introduces the cross-national basis of the project and outlines its objectives and design. The other articles in this Special Issue present initial comparative findings on European children and young people's changing media environments.