Chairs:
Sirkku Kotilainen (Tampere University)
Lotta Ylinen (Tampere University)
Wednesday Nov 8th 2023 at 2.30–5.15 pm (hybrid)
Youth and technology is an actual topic of youth research. Young people have been particularly affected by the pandemics, due to increased social isolation and decreased possibilities of in-person interactions, to use more technologies in their everyday life. Discussions are welcome, for example, on the topics: How is the everyday life of youth with technologies? Youth digital skills? Digital solutions for improving youth wellbeing? Methodological approaches in youth and technologies?
Literacy on Artificial Intelligence (AI-literacy) for Young Adults
Saija Salonen (Tampere University)
Sirkku Kotilainen (Tampere University)
Finlands Pisa ranking results have decreased, and that have caused concern in public debate. The challenges conducted to literacy are multifaceted. Particularly at risk of educational or work-related exhaustion are young people who are less motivated and whose reading and comprehending abilities are poor in reading, mathematics, and natural science. In the current digital platform culture, that may connect with low level of understanding of the artificial intelligence-based communication. Key question is, how practice-based media workshop can increase youth understanding of AI-based communication (AI-literacy)?
The target group of my research are young adults in vulnerable possession, who might face challenges with literacy skills, or they may be in a life situation with a challenge that limits their opportunities to participate in working life, training, or education (NEET youth). The research is in the starting phase: action research with mixed methods will be implemented as media workshops during becoming 2-3 years. Media activities are designed for the target group, and there is no expectation of earlier skills in writing, reading, analyzing, or any form of content creation of AI-based communication. Particularly, radio production in the workshop, can be solely oral-based. This may lower the threshold for participation.
In the presentation, I introduce concepts related to media literacy such a multiliteracies, digital literacy, computer literacy (programming literacy) and, AI-literacy. As an example, I will describe one of the working processes that can be used in community radio productions that utilizes everyday softwares using artificial intelligence. It is expected that similar process can increase the youth AI-literacy.
Negative CV: Digital social stock of knowledge in lives of homeless youth in Finland
Päivi Armila (University of Eastern Finland)
Terhi Halonen (University of Eastern Finland)
In our presentation we refer to Peter Bergers and Thomas Luckmanns theory of social stock of knowledge in terms of digitalization and services for homeless youth. Our empirical argumentation arises from Terhi Halonens dissertation and her data collected among homeless youth and professionals who aim at solving the problems of homeless lives. Digitalization of services and their client-based information collection means that all kinds of notes concerning these youths life-histories and their problems remain recorded in different digital archives. Each time these youth meet professionals and authorities, when seeking help, recordings remain that cumulatively begin to work as negative CVs and profile them as problematic and stigmatized persons. This digital social stock of knowledge is easily available for those who are interested in it. All this, then, makes, for example, homeless youths home-seeking a hard task. Negative CV with its notes of credit reports, evictions, crimes, drug misuse, or other life-problems is not a merit if a rental contract for an apartment is a wanted goal for action. Further: positive and trustful future planning and life organization are hard, maybe impossible for a young person, without a stable and safe place to live in. Digitalization of services form another problem in their case as well: often they are penniless and cannot afford laptops or smartphones – which consequently means that social service professionals and actual information cannot easily find them. Many applications that should be filled in Internet can also remain unreachable for them.
Landscapes of Opportunities and Young People’s Agency in Virtual Environments
Ville-Samuli Haverinen (University of Eastern Finland)
Santtu Haantio (University of Eastern Finland)
Young people have many ways of interacting in different digital environments interconnected via the Internet. These multiple actors in the cyberspace form their own digital cultural environments and fuse regional differences between the (youth) cultures in young people’s physical living environments. At the same time, however, the educational level of parents, the economic income of families and the opportunities for further education offered by the place of residence differ for young people in different parts of Finland. In addition, the ways in which young people use the Internet are strongly influenced by factors such as gender, and thus also by the digital devices, platforms, and services they use, producing different digital cultures.
In this presentation, we examine young people’s agency in different virtual imaginative and placeless environments, opened up through digital devices. At the same time, we are interested in how these digital ways of acting reflect the physical living environments of young people geographically situated, socio-economically, and culturally classed with their different youth-cultural possibilities. In the presentation, we consider how different physical ””landscapes of opportunities”” shape young people’s agency in cyber-coordinated virtual environments. We conclude the presentation by describing how different digital environments not only enable the transgression of many of the boundaries of agency that exist in the physical world, they also produce boundaries the possibilities and constraints of agency on the Internet are always produced by people themselves and power structures are also manifested there.
The presentation is based on data collected in the research project Capturing Digital Social Inequality. Young Digi-Natives Asymmetrical Agencies within Socio-Technical Imperatives and Imaginaries (DEQUAL) (2020–2024). We will use both qualitative and quantitative material collected from different parts of Finland in 2021 and 2022, consisting of individual and group interviews and online questionnaires.
Youths discourses about Internet technologies
Marta Choroszewicz (University of Eastern Finland)
Internet, smartphones, and social media have significantly changed our society and everyday life in a short period of time. Digitalization has impacted the lives of young people especially by introducing new opportunities for participation, social interaction, and influence. Nonetheless, research shows that sociodemographic and socioeconomic status continue to shape the ways in which young people use, for example, digital services and social network sites, as well as what kind of benefits they gain from them. Differential benefits, usages, and exposure to risk may also differ in relation to different fluency in the social network sites features and control to ones own self-representation.
This presentation addresses the issue of socio-digital inequalities and youths relationship with Internet technologies through examination of youths speech about their uses of digital devices and services. It draws on interview data with the Finnish youths (n=28) produced as a part of the project DEQUAL that examines digital inequalities among youths in Finland.
This paper approaches youths speech as culturally embedded discourses that express their strategies for making their digital practices understandable and acceptable to adults. By doing so, the paper addresses the need for ongoing research that explores youths digital practices within a wider social context that often positions them as digital natives, a label that influences their engagement with Internet technologies. The results are organized into 13 discourses under four themes: benefits, harms and risks, changing social interactions, and media literacy. The identified discourses reflect the ways in which young people articulate and negotiate their digital agency with a cultural perception of them as tech-savvy youths. By focusing on youths speech, this study advances current research on understanding youths complex relationship with Internet technologies, including socio-digital inequalities.
Girls and online environment: piloting the workshops on gender-based cyber violence in 5 European countries
Lubica Vysna (Valo-Valmennusyhdistys ry)
Socialization and development in the online environment are a natural part of young peoples lives. Asking for nudes, sending nudes, making jokes about ones physical appearance, manipulative messages or threats of sexual and physical violence are so common, that young people often perceive it as normal behaviour in the online environment. Based on the findings from Finland, 60% of young people spend 4 or more hours per day online. 50% of them have experienced online violence and 80% witnessed violence against other people. (Mannerheimin Lastensuojeluliitto, 2021).
The amount of time spent on various social media platforms does not differ among genders, but different genders usually experience different types of unwanted behaviours. Nadim and Fladmoe (2021) concluded, that males usually experience more name-calling and physical threats, while females face sexual violence.
This contribution aims to disseminate experiences from the piloting of training modules on various aspects of gender-based cyber violence in 5 European countries (Finland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Romania) as part of the project #PreventGBV: Early prevention of gender-based cyberviolence for young people in conflict with the law in juvenile justice systems, co-founded by European Union.
The workshops are aimed at young people in conflict with the law, with a specific focus on girls and young adult females. The whole set of workshops is currently under implementation and the preliminary findings will be known at the end of October 2023.
At the conference, we will discuss the results and share experiences from a gender perspective.
New Ways to Decrease Social Isolation and to Increase Social Interaction
Lotta Ylinen (Tampere University)
Sirkku Kotilainen (Tampere University)
Simona Lohan (Tampere University)
Atte Oksanen (Tampere University)
Teenagers as young people have been particularly affected by the last two years of pandemics, due to increased social isolation and decreased possibilities of in-person interactions, so this unique social situation has most probably expanded the amount of loneliness among youth. Social isolation has been linked to young peoples dropouts from school especially in the change to secondary level of education in the ages of 15–17 years old as being the period of searching themselves. For example, low literacy and learning skills together with ethnic and gender related challenges have been reported to cause social isolation and dropouts among youth. Typically, this problem has been addressed from the social- sciences point of view, yet the fast development of wireless technologies (such as various sensors, wearables, and mobile apps) holds the promise of new solutions to decrease the youths isolation. The main goal of this project is to develop technology-based solutions and frameworks for tackling the problem based on broad mixed tech data and youth participatory approach for designing the solution. By merging the forces from social sciences and wireless communication with navigation domain in this topic, we will ensure a holistic methodology and profound understanding of the social isolation challenges and countermeasures in youngsters lives.
Research is in the starting phase as a project (2023–2027), including a PhD study. Tentative mixed methods include, for example, future studies-based youth participatory approach, interviews, and sensor-based data collection. Ethical aspects are reflected throughout the study, having the ethical understanding as a process conducting ethical norms and principles and practicing ethics in several ways. The conference presentation will describe the convergence aspects in this study and the focus on the PhD study.
Digipelaajien sosiaaliset suhteet
Nina-Elise Koivumäki (Humanistinen ammattikorkeakoulu)
Siiri-Liisi Kraav (University of Eastern Finland)
Samu Sorola (University of Eastern Finland)
Paavo Vartiainen (University of Eastern Finland)
Riitta Vornanen & Pasi Karjalainen (University of Eastern Finland)
Pelaaminen on suosittu harrastus nuorilla ja keskeinen osa tämän päivän nuorisokulttuuria. Tuoreimman pelaajabarometrin mukaan (Kinnunen ym. 2022) 10–19-vuotiaat pelaavat keskimäärin 16,4 tuntia viikossa ja kaksikymppiset keskimäärin 11,3 tuntia viikossa. Pelaaminen on enää harvoin eristäytynyttä toimintaa, vaan enemmänkin sosiaalinen harrastus. Peliympäristöissä syntyvistä ihmissuhteista on vielä vähän tutkimustietoa. Tiedetään kuitenkin, että peliympäristöt voivat olla helpottaa esimerkiksi ujojen henkilöiden ihmissuhteiden solmimista (Kowert ym.2014).
Game Over? Continue! hanke on ESR-rahoitteinen Savonian, Humakin ja Itä-Suomen yliopiston yhteishanke, jossa on tarjottu nuorille ryhmämuotoista pelitoimintaa tavoitteena ehkäistä syrjäytymistä ja vahvistaa työ- ja opiskeluelämään kiinnittymistä. 16–29-vuotiaat nuoret ovat kokoontuneet yhteen pienryhmiin, joissa on tutustuttu pelaamisen eri ulottuvuuksiin ja toteutettu yhdessä pelitapahtuma. Toimintamallin vaikutuksia osallistujan hyvinvointiin on seurattu poikkitieteellisesti fysiologiselta, sosiaaliselta ja psykologiselta kannalta. Fysiologiselta kannalta osallistuja mittasi itsenäisesti mittareilla omia liikuntatottumuksia, unen laatua ja stressitasoa. Osallistujat saivat tutkijalta palautetta mittauksista. Psykososiaaliselta kannalta kyselyillä kartoitettiin osallistujan mielenterveyden, yksinäisyyden, ahdistuneisuuden, peliriippuvuuden ja toimintakyvyn tilaa toiminnan aikana.
Yhtenä osana tutkimusta olivat nuorten teemahaastattelut. Haastatteluissa käytettiin verkostokarttaa (ecomap) apuvälineenä kuvaamaan tärkeitä sosiaalisia suhteita verkossa ja reaalielämässä sekä turvallisuuden ja kuulumisen kokemuksia. Haastatteluun on osallistunut kesään 2023 mennessä 10 pelaamista aktiivisesti harrastavaa nuorta aikuista, iältään 20–30-vuotiaita.
Esityksessä tarkastellaan, millaisia sosiaalisia suhteita pelaaville nuorille on syntynyt peliharrastamisen kautta sekä reaali- että virtuaalimaailmassa ja millaisia merkityksiä nuoret näille suhteille antavat. Haastatteluaineistosta etsittiin vastauksia näihin kysymyksiin sisällönanalyysin avulla. Haastateltavien puheesta syntynyttä aineistoa yhdistettiin heidän kanssaan laadittuihin verkostokarttoihin, joiden avulla voitiin tarkastella, kuinka läheisiä tai etäisiä eri ihmiset ja yhteisöt haastateltaville olivat.
Haastatteluissa tuli ilmi, että pelaamisen kautta nuorille oli muodostunut erilaisia sosiaalisia suhteita ja yhteisöjä, joihin he kokivat kuuluvansa. Osa pelaamisen kautta syntyneistä ihmissuhteista saattoi olla hyvinkin pitkäkestoisia ja syviä ja osa kevyempiä, ei vahvaa kiinnittymistä vaativia. Pelaamisen kautta näyttää muodostuvan nuorille hyvin merkityksellisiä ystävyyssuhteita, myös parisuhteita. Online-suhteet voivat olla nuorelle yhtä tärkeitä kuin reaalimaailman suhteet, mutta fyysisiä kohtaamisia ystävien kanssa arvostetaan silti paljon.