Entertainment
We look at the transformations that take place in entertainment settings and non-formal education contexts, whenever interactive media are present. The contexts involving young people, whose activities are now inseparable from the Internet, are linked to social media, platforms, and a culture of connectivity.
We focus around the following entertainment settings:
Social networks mediated by the Internet has introduced types of relationship which were unthinkable a few years ago.
Fandom around video games like Fortnite and how gamers interact with the game designers through social media
How young people connect literature and cinema, for example, delving into the Harry Potter online communities
New practices around TV series, which have transformed traditional TV and its young audiences
Fandom
We explore young people’s fan communities, as participant observers. This implies accepting that people belong to a group with which they share values, goals, and forms of action.
We assume certain theoretical frameworks; they mostly concern human activity with regards to the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they emerge.
Acting, producing, and sharing are the three fan activities that lead to cultural phenomenon representing fandom.
The use of digital tools and technologies has led to major changes in these activities which are related to concepts of practice, discourse, and community.
Moreover, fan communities are firstly related to activities which are interpreted in keeping with the concept of civic commitment. Currently, we are also interested in the youth activities carried out in multiplatform contexts.
Video Games
We cannot resist a recommendation: play, play, play! Let’s lose our fear of consoles and screens as a good starting point to thinking passionately. Let’s play with other people, of all ages, in real or virtual settings. Sharing knowledge teaches us to improve and progress.
As objects governed by rules or as an expression of popular culture and aesthetics. They are tools for thinking and problem solving.
As always in life, passion and thought interact and mold our actions and indeed why should video games be any different
Digital Literacies
Education needs to provide tools to help acquire new forms of literacy through which the messages produced by digital tools are deciphered. Young people produce multiple kinds of discourses, oral, written, and visual and they need to comprehend their signs and respond to them.
That means being particularly aware of the type of language used. This is how we understand literacy.
We explore the practices of teenagers and adolescents when they use Instagram or Tik Tok, to understand from there, how they use multimodal discourses.
“Digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”