Growing Up Wireless: Being a parent and being a child in the age of Mobile Communication

Digital Literacy: Tools and Methodologies for Information Society strives to define a conceptual framework for understanding social changes produced by digital media and creates a framework within which digital literacy acts as a tool to assist younger generations to interact critically with digital media and their culture, providing scholars, educators, researchers, and practitioners a technological and sociological approach to this cutting-edge topic from an educational perspective. Caronia' contribution concerns contemporary changes in parenting and in parent/children relationship related to the diffusion of mobile communication devices. According to a phenomenological theoretical approach to culture and everyday life, individuals are constantly engaged in constructing the meaningful dimensions of the world they live in. Every day life needs thus to be conceived as a never ending cultural work through which social actors produce the meaning, structures and social organization of the world they live in, as well as the identities of themselves and the people they interact with. Everyday language and interaction are the primary tools of such a work of culture construction. However the material features of everyday life contexts are more then an inert background for culture construction. Things, whether technological or not, participate in such a process: as cultural artefacts, they both are domesticated into already existing patterns of meaning and create new ones. This is even more so with information and communication technologies: their progressive introduction into people’s everyday life, the multiplication of possible new courses of action, ways of communicating and getting information, hypothetically expand the range of tools through which individuals construct culture and identities. Overcoming the “subject-object” duality, we need to rethink the relationship between humans and technologies in term of reflexivity that is a mutual construction of meaning and a reciprocal sense making. The process of mutual construction among technologies, culture and society may be analysed at the macro level of patterns of diffusion and uses, as well at the micro level of ordinary everyday interactions. In this chapter the author will focus on the role of mobile communication in the construction of family social organization and inner culture. How does the introduction of mobile phones affect family life and intergenerational relationships? How does mobile contact contribute in the construction of new cultural models of “being a parent” and “being a child”? How it contributes in the creation of new forms of family education and peer socialization? Drawing upon data from recent research, the author analyses the role of mobile phone in the rise of new cultural models of parenting and its domestication by teenagers as a tool for group membership and peer culture construction.