Digital Natives Romanians Can Hardly Imagine Life without Internet
Digital Natives Romanians Can Hardly Imagine Life without Internet

Summary/Abstract: In the current digitalized world Romania is the land of contrasts: we are the last in Europe at digital competences but we have almost the highest connectivity speed in Europe – 2 nd place (DESI, 2018). Through smart phones, Internet data consumption is growing exponentially especially among children and teenagers, but is lacking the education for a healthy and responsible usage. The EUKIDS research from spring 2018 in Romania show that 84% of children 9 – 17 years old are accessing Internet from a mobile device, 4 times more than five years ago. (Velicu, Balea, Barbovschi, 2019). Similar, the INSSE (National Institute of Statistics) research from the same period found that 9 in 10 students (97,3%) are accessing internet several times per day (Cuturela, Gheorghe, et al. 2018). The effects on children are not always positive, 33% of them reported encountering negative experiences on-line, and 50% were exposed to images with extreme violence, show the same report. In the absence of joint actions at the level of social policies and sustained educational interventions, every child, family and school are facing in a personal manner the excess technology within our society. This paper will address Romanian children’s internet consumption habits reviewing the newest results of researches on teenagers and corelating them with data gathered in autumn 2018 from empirical researches within two gymnasium schools in Bucharest, children 11 – 15 years old, using quantitative and qualitative methods: a questionnaire for 250 children and individual essays on describing how they imagine future life without internet and multimedia technologies. The results are surprising, especially boys telling that they cannot imagine life without Internet. That’s why this paper aims to rise an alarm signal about the importance of educating youngers to efficient use the technology, but also to leave happily in a “free-of-technology” manner.

• Details
• Contents