Adolescents’ perspectives on the role of ICTs in everyday life: An ethnographic study on practices, representations, and emotions.

The present contribution builds upon the preliminary results of a research project funded by the European Commission, and aimed at documenting the role of ICTs in adolescent development and family communication. A trans disciplinary approach of developmental/social psychology and media studies, and mixed-method procedures, including innovative ethnographic methods, informed the research project. Twenty Italian adolescents (14-16 years) and their families were recruited through secondary schools and were involved in the research over a one-year period. For the purpose of this contribution, I discuss results concerning the practices, representations, and emotions of adolescents using ICTs’, and illustrate child-centered ethnographic procedures, namely Subjective Evidence Based Ethnography (SEBE), i.e. first-person perspective data gathering via micro-cameras (subcam). The analyses of video-recordings, made by adolescents, leverage insights on the use of ICTs in everyday-life situations (homework, dinner, leisure time): (a) Adolescents showed a preference for a combination of old and new digital media (smartphones and TV), (b) smartphones afforded the extension of social and cognitive offline activities (c) negative emotions were associated with ‘perpetual connection’, i.e. full-time contact. Processes of smooth/rough domestication and strategies developed by adolescents to deal with the use of ICTs are discussed.