Presentation gave during the twenty first century teenager conference, hold in Leeds - 10-12 July 2008

1. Teenagers and Media representation: Switching the perspective. How teenagers represent themselves in a media environment. Luca Rossi LaRiCA / University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”

2. persistence/ easy to search/ addressed to an unknowable audience/ easy to replicate/ (boyd 2007) Growing availability of User Generated Content: wesearch/ scenario

3. wesearch/ scenario persistence invisible audiences replicability searchability few Writings Printing press, newspapers Digital media (pc, video-cameras) World Wide Web + Google (Google Book Search) many Writings Personal online publishing / Web 2.0 (Blogs, Flickr, YouTube) Digital media (pc, video-cameras) World Wide Web + Google (Google Blog Search)

4. media&generation/ research Is it possible to use ugc to observe the emergence of the generational discourse? [ world-wide, media based, generational wesense (Edmunds, Turner 2005) ] May specific media products get user generated generational discourses started?

5. wesearch/ methodology   Keywords Identification Through 5 focus groups we’ve identified 45 media products to be used as keywords to investigate online discourses

6. wesearch/ methodology    Query strings definition a) Avoid unwanted responses (spam) b) Obtain the full text of every blog entry (yahoo pipes) c) choose between chronological or “by relevance” output

7. Storage of blog entries and retrieval of authors’ information a) Incremental storage of RSS entries b) Scraping of authors’ information wesearch/ methodology    supported platforms: Blogger ITA / ENG Flickr ENG Il Cannocchiale ENG Libero ITA Splinder ITA Windows Live Space ENG YouTube ENG

8. Summary of collected data starting set of keyword: 45 retrieved blogs entries: 3000 cases with authors’ data: 928 wesearch/ methodology  

9. Collected data: age distribution wesearch/ methodology   100% Totale 79%  28 Y generation 15% 29-41 X generation 3% 41-54 Boomers 3%  55 Postwar % Age (2007) Generation

10. media&generation/ results Media products are anchors for personal memories which can be used in an individual or a generational way.

11. media&generation/ results “ The Party (La Boum)" and ”The Party 2"... Today as yesterday are cult movies of my life… even if my time has been more the “missed party time!” I was more than 18 and still waiting for the first kiss!! I’ve always been slow, naive, dreamer and scared” (A. female 44 years old)

12. media&generation/ conclusions “ for us it wasn’t Christmas if there wasn’t the Coca-Cola Ad(that one with the tree), and “Home alone” on Tv… ”. (A. male 19 years old)

13. media&generation/ conclusions 55,66% 28,3% C generation (1980-2000) 55,56% 28,7% Y generation (1979-1991) 55,56% 28,7% Boomerang generation (1977-1989) 53,85% 30,77% MTV generation (1974-1981) 47,06% 41,18% X generation (1966-1978) rappresentazione individuale rappresentazione generazionale

14. generational use individual use media&generation/ conclusions

15. me generation?

18. http://mediageneration.wordpress.com [email_address] http://www.soc.uniurb.it/larica