Search

The article is an extended essay on the subject of the impact of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) over important partitions of everyday life, stressing the influences on youth, considered the "digital generation" as they integrated ICTs in their lives and are now continuously connected to the computer-mediated communication as their main or secondary socializing option. The paper underscores the vulnerabilities of youth behaviour when using the ICTs and the virtual space that can generate risks to their personal safety or can have a bad influence on the development of their identities or personalities. The article also illustrates how the interest for these topics is reflected both in theoretical papers and in empirical researches in the field of sociology, psychology or social psychology, and emphasizes the negative effects of ICTs on youth, considering the mentioned variables. The essay approach is inspired by the work of Ulrich Beck, in that it will include general references to the effects of the ICTs on the entire society, but it will underscore the negative ones and their influence over youth, especially the risks that cannot be isolated as in real life (Beck, 1992, 2), as they originate in an uncontrollable space, the virtual one. The essay represents the point of view of an adult that did not experimented a childhood or an adolescence connected to the digital technologies (Weber and Mitchell, in Buckingham, 2008, 26), and the opinion of a novice researcher that tried to familiarize first with the previous theoretical and empirical background on the subject of the vulnerabilities of the online behaviour of children before starting his own research project on a similar topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]