Y OUNG C HILDREN (0-8) AND D IGITAL TECHNOLOGY A qualitative exploratory study - National report ROMANIA Anca Velicu* & Monica Mitarcă** *Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy ** Christian University ‘Dimitrie Cantemir’ 09 February 2016 09 February 2016 Executive summary ....................................................................................................................... 4 Key findings ................................................................................................................................ 4 Recommendations....................................................................................................................... 5 Recommendations to Policy-makers ...................................................................................... 5 Recommendations to Industries............................................................................................. 6 Recommendations to Parents and Carers ............................................................................. 6 Recommendations to School, Libraries, Museums ............................................................... 6 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 7 2. Family Portrait Gallery .......................................................................................................... 8 3. 2.1. Family RO01 .................................................................................................................... 9 2.2. Family RO02 .................................................................................................................. 12 2.3. Family RO03 .................................................................................................................. 15 2.4. Family RO04 .................................................................................................................. 17 2.5. Family RO05 .................................................................................................................. 19 2.6. Family RO06 .................................................................................................................. 22 2.7. Family RO07 .................................................................................................................. 25 2.8. Family RO 08 ................................................................................................................. 27 2.9. Family RO09 .................................................................................................................. 30 2.10. Family RO10 ................................................................................................................ 33 2.11. Family RO11 ................................................................................................................ 36 Findings................................................................................................................................. 39 3.1. How do children under the age of 8 engage with new (online) technologies? ............. 39 3.1.1. The devices ............................................................................................................... 39 3.1.2. Activities and applications ...................................................................................... 41 3.2. 3.1.2.1. Video games ...................................................................................................... 42 3.1.2.2. Watching video .................................................................................................. 43 3.1.2.3. Content creation................................................................................................ 44 3.1.2.4. Communication ................................................................................................. 46 How are new (online) technologies perceived by the different family members? ....... 47 3.2.1. The perception of the devices .................................................................................. 47 3.2.1.1. The smartphone, a yet not necessary device ................................................... 47 3.2.1.2. The tablet – an extra toy .................................................................................. 48 3.2.1.3. Technology? I mean, the device ........................................................................ 50 3.2.2. Positive perception on the digital technologies: the opportunities ....................... 52 3.2.2.1. The influence over the literacy ......................................................................... 52 1| 09 February 2016 3.2.2.2. Technologies, a parenting help ........................................................................ 53 3.2.2.3. The family united around technology .............................................................. 54 3.2.3. 3.3. How do parents manage their younger children’s use of (online) technologies? ........ 59 3.3.1. The existence of the rules........................................................................................ 59 3.3.2. Monitoring, Supervision, Control ........................................................................... 63 3.3.3. Technological mediation .......................................................................................... 64 3.3.4. Punishment / reward system .................................................................................. 65 3.3.5. Active mediation ...................................................................................................... 66 3.3.6. The active mediation challenges ............................................................................. 67 3.3.7. The parent as a model ............................................................................................. 68 3.3.8. Sibling mediation..................................................................................................... 68 3.4. 4. Negative perceptions and risks............................................................................... 56 Surprising findings ........................................................................................................ 69 DIGCOMP framework .......................................................................................................... 71 4.1. Evaluation of each child’s digital skills ........................................................................ 71 4.2. Overall evaluation of Romanian sample ....................................................................... 77 4.3. Discussion on the appropriateness of DIGCOMP grid for evaluating young children’s digital skills .............................................................................................................................. 77 5. Method ................................................................................................................................... 79 5.1. Procedure ........................................................................................................................ 79 5.1.1. The sampling procedure .......................................................................................... 79 5.1.1.1. 5.1.2. The sample ............................................................................................................... 80 5.1.3. Implementation of the protocol of observations ..................................................... 81 5.1.4. Recording ................................................................................................................. 83 5.1.5. Implementation of the protocol of analysis ............................................................ 84 5.2. 6. A few words on the Romanian school system .................................................. 79 Discussion ....................................................................................................................... 84 5.2.1. Why might the results have turned out that way? ................................................ 84 5.2.2. In what way did the findings changed over time? ................................................. 84 5.2.3. How could the study be improved? ......................................................................... 85 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 86 6.1. Key findings .................................................................................................................... 86 6.1.1. Children’s engagement with digital technology..................................................... 86 6.1.2. Perceptions and attitudes ....................................................................................... 86 6.1.3. Parental mediation .................................................................................................. 87 6.1.4. Digital skills ............................................................................................................. 88 2| 09 February 2016 6.2. Recommendations .......................................................................................................... 88 6.2.1. Recommendations to Policy-makers ....................................................................... 88 6.2.2. Recommendations to Industries ............................................................................. 89 6.2.3. Recommendations to Parents and Carers .............................................................. 89 6.2.4. Recommendations to School, Libraries, Museums ................................................ 90 6.2.5. Proposal of further research ................................................................................... 90 7. References ............................................................................................................................. 91 8. Annexes ................................................................................................................................. 93 8.1. Annex DIGCOMP framework........................................................................................ 93 8.2. DIGCOMP filled in for each family in Romanian sample ........................................... 95 3| 09 February 2016 Executive summary Key findings The Romanian households are in their majority still in the computer-era. If given an alternative, kids prefer to migrate on mobile devices, with the tablet as the most common gadget. • Video gaming is the activity all the children five to eight have in common. Kids also watch online videos: either as an extension to the cartoon channels on TV, or for discovering user generated content (vlogs, tutorials etc.). Some kids are actively searching for promotional videos. • Content creation: All the children in the Romanian sample know how and love to take pictures and videos. • Some of the children in the Romanian sample use digital technology in order to engage in communication. • Most of the Romanian parents consider the smartphone as a yet not necessary device for children at this age. • For children, there is a desire of owning technology in itself, in an endless accumulation of devices. For the parents, the choice of technological devices to buy is a cost-driven one. • Parents see the digital technologies as a positive thing, giving their children some opportunities, but also good for the family during the shared activities. • Both the parents and the children in the Romanian sample tend to consider as ‘technology’ and thus worthy to invest in, only the devices themselves; content and software are seen as collateral elements one takes ‘for free’ from the internet. • The interviewed parents think the educational opportunities of digital technology are not available for 6 to 8 year-old children (but for younger or older children). • Parents list some worries (excessive use, inadequate content and health concerns) that they link with digital technology. With few exceptions, these concerns are seen as threats for the future or as a risk for ‘others’. • The universal rule is ‘no paid applications’; apart from this, there are also: time of use rule, content rule, and contact rule (for social media/communication). • The majority of the parents in the sample are involved in some forms of active mediation of their child’s digital life. • Many parents control or supervise the child’s digital activity, either in an unobtrusive way, or in a much more intrusive manner. • Most of the parents are not aware of the parental control options available on fixed or mobile devices; also, most of the parents admit having used the digital technologies in a punishment/reward system. • Most of the children have basic operational skills (know how to open/shot down the device, connect to the internet, install/ delete apps, if using a mobile device). • When they need support, they usually ask one of their parent (not necessary the most skilled), few of them look online for support or ask friends. • In general at this age children do not have a clear image of the online risks, nor do they take steps to protect their devices or have a preventive behaviour online. • All the children know about the very existence of Facebook, but just some of them actively engage in communication online. • 4| 09 February 2016 • At this age, looking for information equates with searching video content or games and apps. All of them manage to run basic searches, sometimes with the assistance of another person, as some of them do not know yet to write. Recommendations Recommendations to Policy-makers • • • Problem: there is an acute lack of educational content in Romanian, situation which discourages children and parents alike to perceive and use the digital technology for educational purposes. Solution: it could be an active encouragement for the development of such content. How: For example, using the model of stimulating the creation of audiovisual content in the national languages there could be a similar stimulation of educational content created in the national languages either by financial stipends or by an imposed fixed quota of national language content for local software developers. Another idea could be for the Ministry of Education to sustain by national competition the development of such content in an Opens Sources System. Problem: there is a lack of awareness from parent’s part regarding the risks of digital technology for children this age – parents tending either to postpone the worries for an older age or to eagerly translate older media worries to these new online technology –misconception which impedes also on the opportunities that digital technology use could have for young children. Solution: there is a need for correctly informing parents on both, risks and opportunities that digital media can have for young children. How: one could imagine a media campaign to inform parents on the issue, campaign sustained by public and commercial media pro bono. An alternative or complementary solution would be to run an informative campaign for parents through schools or kindergarten (sometimes such informative sessions are already in place, but they target the parents of older children). Problem: All children at this age and most of their parents consider digital technology only as an entertainment tool for children under 8 year-old. Also, none of the interviewed children does use the digital technology for school, as teachers never advice them to do so or encourage them in that direction. Thus for children at the age of 6 to 8, there seems to be two totally separate worlds: school-world and digitalworld. Moreover, some parents said that in schools or kindergarten there aren’t any (functional) digital devices that could be used in educational process. Solution: there is a need for a coherent effort to ensure the presence of such devices, as well as the content and the teachers’ prep, in order to introduce digital technologies in kindergartens and schools, from the youngest age. An important goal is the change of perception regarding technologies, so they get to be considered an educational tool and not only an entertainment tool. How: in Romania, there are already programs for endowing schools with digital technology. These programs should be extended for kindergarten and also should be extended to keep updating the technology (for example, there are not systematic programs which aim to bring mobile technology in school, most projects having stopped at desktop computers). An increase in the digital literacy is also needed (including informational literacy, critical media literacy etc.) for teachers, parents and children alike. 5| 09 February 2016 Recommendations to Industries • • Problem: Most of the parents do not know about the existence of parental control solution, for computers or for mobile devices. Solution: the industry could actively contribute to an increase of parental awareness of the possible solutions for protecting the children. How: the industry producing security software which include parental control options could have more visible informative campaign aiming to promote these solutions. Another possible solution could be to set the device on a safety profile designed for the use of a child, from the stage of the initialization of the device (when one chooses the basic features of the device, as is the language or the time, to have the possibility to choose child-profile). Problem: many parents and children denounce the lack of educational content adequate to this age (there are all too childish or too difficult). Solution: a more informed perception of the industry regarding what exactly children at this age do use and how they do engage with technology could be beneficial. How: mutually advantageous partnership between industry and researchers (as it is already in place in other countries) could be a viable solution for this problem. Recommendations to Parents and Carers • • We recommend the parents to be aware that for children, as important as a good device is a quality content. Thus, in order to offer the child the benefits of online technology, parents have to be more willing to invest money and time in an active search of such content. We observed that parents tend to consider their role in active mediation stops once the child acquires operational competencies, after which they can withdraw in a restrictive mediation role that counterbalances the first step they made towards technology (often times seen as a Pandora box). We recommend parents to reconsider their role in active mediation as extending through the entire childhood, and to understand they should accompany their child in all their digital life as children. Recommendations to School, Libraries, Museums • • At this age, there is a total lack of the risks awareness from the children’s part regarding online technology. There should be introduced in schools and in kindergartens e-safety courses, with content that fits both children’s cognitive development and children’s use of technology. These courses should educate children on the possible risks of the digital technologies and on the possible prevention methods. As the school is totally separated in children’s and parents’ perceptions from the children’s digital world, the same happens with other cultural institutions as libraries or museums, obsolete and not so informative institutions, not at all friendly to our digital kids. It is advisable the situation changes and museums and libraries to start considering younger children as one of their key-target and offer them digital information in a suitable form, adapted to their cognitive development and their interests. 6| 09 February 2016 1. Introduction The research focusing on the benefits and challenges associated with children’s use of the Internet has, so far, mainly targeted 9-16 years old (Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2014, Livingstone et al., 2011). Yet, research shows that children are going online at an increasingly younger age (Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2014, Marsh et al., 2015). In spite of the substantial increase in usage by very young children, research seems to be lagging behind (Holloway et al., 2013). Therefore, research targeting 0-8 years old, exploring the benefits and risks of their online engagement is imperative. This study is conducted in the framework of the JRC’s Project ECIT, Empowering Citizens’ Rights in emerging ICT (Project n. 572) and represents the second stage of the Young Children (0-8) and Digital Technology research, initiated in 2014; at that point, the research comprised seven European countries (see Chaudron et al., 2015). In the second stage of the project, 11 other countries joined in, on a self-financing basis – among which, Romania. In both stages of the project, the main purpose of the study was to explore, within a qualitative framework, the young children’ and their families` experiences with new technologies. In particular, we looked at the children’s (online) technological engagement as well as the potential benefits and risks associated with their (online) interactions with new technologies. At the national level, the results of the study will serve as an informed basis for future national research, showing the general trends of young children’s use of digital technology, but also the gaps in literature and challenges associated with it. The study also aims at increasing stakeholders’ awareness about the very fact that children at this age do use digital technology, therefore any policy paper should consider this reality. The aim of our research is to generate data to address the overall question, in what ways, if any, are children and/or their families empowered by the use of new (online) technologies? Thus, in the context of the acute lack of data regarding Romanian young children’s use of digital technology, this study’s aim is twofold: firstly, to offer a general picture on how do Romanian young children engage with digital technology. For this, the study will answer questions such as: What devices do young children use? How exactly do they use them? What are their online activities and how do they interact with others? Secondly, after the examining the overview, the study will focus on the risks and benefits, answering the question what are the benefits or risks, regarding young children’s use of digital technologies at home? In 2014, four areas of specific investigation have been identified (see Chaudron et al., 2015), the focus of the study being (1) how do children engage with digital technology and (2) how these technologies are perceived by different family members. In the second stage of the study (2015), the international team agreed to restructure the research questions upon two main axes: (1) the use-perception axis and (2) the individual-family context axis. Therefore, four main topics resulted, to be addressed in the present Report for the Romanian sample. The national teams agreed to follow as much as possible the same method, by which we refer to the protocol of observation, the schedules for interviews with parents and children, the supportive activities in which the researchers and the parents and/or children engaged during the interview (e.g. cards games, activity around Activity book etc.) and the main features of the sample. All the deviations from the common Protocol of Observation are 7| 09 February 2016 mentioned and discussed in the Method section of this Report. The Romanian Report is based on the interviews of 11 families of at least one child with the age 6-8 years old. 2. Family Portrait Gallery For a general picture of the families which formed Romanian sample, see the Table 1. T ABLE 1: R OMANIAN SAMPLE ( WITH DEMOGRAPHICAL DATA AND SES DATA ) Family code Member Code Ethnicity Sex Age Year school/ max level of education Profession parents RO1f46 Low – mediumhigh family income Medium** RO01 Romanian M 46 Tertiary RO01 RO01 RO02 RO02 RO02 RO03 RO03 RO03 RO03 RO04 RO04 RO1m45 RO1g6 RO02m27 RO02GM67 RO02g7 RO03f41 RO03m41 RO03gm RO03g7 RO04f30 RO04m28 Medium** Medium** Low** Low** Low** Medium ** Medium** Medium** Low* Low* Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian F F F F F M F F F M F 45 6 27 67 7 41 41 7 30 28 Tertiary 1st Primary Upper secondary Upper secondary 2nd Primary Upper secondary Upper secondary 2nd Primary Lower Secondary Lower Secondary Self employed (Engineer) Philologist RO04 RO04 RO04 RO05 RO05 RO05 RO05 RO06 RO04gm RO04g6 RO04b10 RO05f35 RO05m35 RO05b7 RO05b3 RO06f47 Low* Low* Low* High* High* High* High* Medium* Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian F F M M F M M M 6 10 35 35 7 3 47 Kindergarten 4th primary Tertiary Tertiary 1st primary Kindergarten Tertiary RO06 RO06 RO07 RO06m37 RO06b8 RO07f38 Medium* Medium* Medium* Romanian Romanian Romanian F M M 37 8 38 Tertiary 2nd primary Tertiary RO07 RO07 RO07 RO07 RO07 RO07 RO08 RO08 RO08 RO08 RO07m38 RO07gm67 RO07gf69 RO07b6 RO07b4 RO07g0 RO08f26 RO08m26 RO08gm43 RO08gf44 Medium* Medium* Medium* Medium* Low*/Medium** Low*/Medium** - Lipoven Lipoven Lipoven Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian F F M M M F M F F M 38 67 69 6 4 0 26 26 43 44 Tertiary Kindergarten 2nd kindergarten None Upper secondary Upper secondary - Factory worker Retired Salesman Saleswoman Retired Tractor-driver Seasonal work in agriculture Retired Manager Lawyer Self employed (ex-journalist) Housewife 8| University lecturer PR officer Retired Retired Electrician Housewife - 09 February 2016 RO08 RO08g6 Low*/Medium** RO09 RO09f27 Low*/Medium** RO09 RO09m29 Low*/Medium** RO09 RO09b6 Low*/Medium** RO09 RO09g1 Low*/Medium** RO10 RO10m39 Low* RO10 RO10gm RO10 RO10gf RO10 RO10b5 Low* RO10 RO10b6 Low * RO11 RO11f41 Low * RO11 RO11m37 Low * RO11 RO11g6 Low * RO11 RO11g11 Low * (*) data provided by the family (**) researcher evaluation (***) family self-evaluation (-) lack of information on the topic 2.1. Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian F M F M F F F M M M M F F F 6 27 29 6 1 39 5 6 41 37 6 11 Kindergarten Upper secondary Upper secondary None None Upper secondary Kindergarten 1st primary Upper secondary Upper secondary Kindergarten 4th primary Electrician Chamber maid Administrator Retired Retired Electrician Housekeeper Family RO01 Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • Emil, RO1f46, medium user Adina, RO1m45, heavy user Luana, RO1g6, finished 0 grade at the moment of the interview, medium user Narrative The family has two properties – a two room apartment in Bucharest and a house 100 km south of Bucharest, in a fluvial harbor by the Danube shores. Their life is divided also between those two cities. During the week and sometimes in weekends, when school/activities may require so, Adina and Luana live in Bucharest, where the latter goes to school, while Emil lives and works 100 km from Bucharest, at his boat and yacht workshop. During the weekends and holidays, the family reunites usually at Emil’s, and less often in Bucharest, according to Luana’s schedule. The interview took place at their Bucharest apartment, the day Luana was six and a half years old; it was mid June 2015 and she had just finished first school year (0 Grade). Digital technologies in this family are used rather individually, each family member having their gadget of choice; as a whole, the family’s not overly digitalized. Thus, at Bucharest, the mother uses intensively her desktop computer – “I am like in a withdrawal if I don’t have my computer”, (RO01m45) –, Luana uses her own tablet (without any 3/4G connection to the Internet) she received from her father on her 6th 9| 09 February 2016 birthday – she also loves watching TV. The father uses the laptop (generally, at his house) or the tablet he initially bought for Adina, but she’d refused at that moment: “I told him I’d like to have a tablet for the vacations and got it, but have never used it since”, (RO01m45). Before “So I suppose should there be any (wifi, receiving her tablet, Luana has n. AV&MM) Internet at home it would access to her mother’s computer, but be much worse. You know, I don’t think only too seldom (once a month or so); at her father’s laptop she’s got access the tablet in itself is as bad as the when she is at him. In their Pandora box which is the Internet. You Bucharest apartment there is a just don’t know what you can find by single TV set cabled and connected to opening it.” (mother, 45, RO01m45) the DVD player; here their Internet connection is a broadband, the mother refusing to set up a wifi connection as a means of restricting Luana’s Internet access. In exchange, in their house away from Bucharest, they have a wifi network. The father has a Blackberry smartphone, which does not attract Luana so much; she only likes to look at the pictures her father has in it and always looks at them next to him. The mother, owing an ‘obsolete’ phone, is rather reluctant towards mobile and convergent media, being an adept of dedicated, singular use devices: “I like simple things, doing only one thing at a time. So I looked all over, if you believe me, I looked for a mobile phone that wouldn’t take pictures – and it was impossible to find one, you see? Yeah, so I think that, in order to do one thing right, you only have to do that one thing, you know? Not a million things at once” (RO01m45). Luana has got her own photo camera she received when she turned 5; she also uses her mom’s mp3 player to listen to stories in the evening (the player is connected to the speakers of the snoozer digital clock in the bedroom – so it is not a mobile use, with headphones). Adina graduated philological studies and worked in the past as a manager of an IT company; at some point she even had her own business. She gave up any professional life once having Luana, as she dedicated completely to nurturing and educating her. Thus, she tries to fill her daughter’s schedule with extra-curricular activities: “Basketball on Saturdays and Sundays, dance on Mondays and Wednesdays, on Tuesday, craftwork, art history and handicrafts” (RO01m45). Adina prefers organized activities for Luana, as she admits not being that ‘playful’ and thus hardly dealing with her daughter’s explosive personality: “After two hours of playing basketball and a party – she spent three hours at a kids’ party in the morning – she wanted to go ice skating as well. And people say I am overburdening her’ (RO01m45). Her relaxation moments are at the computer, with ‘one hand on the mouse’, where she mostly spends time on Facebook (using it actively, commenting and frequently posting her own written texts) and on a blog on mothering (named momAdina’). Although she is one of the earliest Internet and PC users, for work as well as for recreational use, at this moment Adina declares herself sort of exceeded by the new technologies: 10 | 09 February 2016 “I don’t know, I think I got old. Really, I think I can’t assimilate technology. There are more and more complicated things, more and more functions. (...) To me it’s already difficult, learning new tricks. I really don’t want to, I told you. And I haven’t always been this way – rather contrary” (RO01m45). A Polytechnic Institute graduate, Emil is passionate about real, palpable things: he builds boats, raises animals, and cultivates the land. His love of animals passed on to Luana; she is excited about their animals at her father’s house: “pigs are so friendly – and lately I have an owl!” (RO01g6). Her mother explains the girl’s passion for Talking Tom through her daughter’s love for animals: “And she liked this idea of taking care of an animal. So she took care of Tom. To feed him, wash him, clothe him. At TV, she likes the Little Pet Show (…) still with pets and also on the tablet, (…) pet related games. I don’t know if it’s the game genre or her love towards animals, her caring for animals. So if there could be a math game with animals instead of numbers, she would do it, I guess” (RO01m45). Emil is not a big fan of the computer, although he uses it proficiently. When the family reunites, Luana spends a lot of time with her dad, in various activities (from shopping to doing her homework, playing outside or going in the park). Usually, when she is at home, Luana keeps the TV set on, on a cartoon channel (Minimax or, recently, Disney Jr.), which ensures a background soundtrack; she turns her attention towards it and really watches it when a new episode is on (that happens seldom). In the evenings she may get to watch the news or a game show with her mother. While the TV is always on, accompanying her during her daily routine, the tablet is used in a different logic, that of a dedicated time. Thus, after coming back from school and eating lunch, while her mother rests, she plays on the tablet for less than an hour; the same in the evening, before going to sleep, when her mother goes to her computer. Playing is the only activity Luana does on the tablet; her favourite games are escape & obstacles type (‘racing’, as she calls them) or the nurture and mimics type (Talking Tom and Angela are both on her tablet). She’s got neither ‘educational’ games on it, nor drawing apps, although while playing on her mother’s computer she used Paint to draw or make photo montages. When she wants to take a picture and especially during holidays she uses the camera instead of the tablet. She listens to music especially in the car (from CDs she knows by heart, as she loves to listens songs and stories she already knows) and lately, she started wanting to also see the videos of the songs on TV (to her mother’s despair, as she thinks music is to be “listened, not seen”), watches music channels on TV or asks her mother to search and put on various songs on Youtube, on her desktop computer. Although she knows how to use her tablet – installing her own games, deleting the ones she does not want anymore, thinking strategically to take the tablet with her in spaces where she knows she would have free wifi access to refresh her app stock, etc. –, she still needs her mother’s help for using other technologies. Thus, for example, she does not use the DVDplayer by herself, although she watches DVD films ever since she was two, her mother control strategy for media content her daughter’s exposed to is to only allow her to watch DVDs of animated films or shows (pre-recorded, not live, from TV). Her mother sees the influence of the tablet, in the way Luana uses it at the moment of the interview, as rather negative. Without denying the learning opportunities the tablet offers, in school – “I might, sometime in the future, change my mind, because I know there will be digital textbooks and other bullshit like that where the tablet might turn useful and that 11 | 09 February 2016 would weigh in” (RO01m45) – or informally – “I mean, I understand if one develops an ability, something at all. Getting one’s way out of a labyrinth” (RO01m45), Adina admits that most of the stuff Luana has got installed on the tablet is “rubbish, not helping her at all”. Yet, she does not involve herself in a proper, active mediation of Luna’s digital world – which is more of a surprise, given her own active mediation and her teaching the kid to understand TV contents and be critical towards them. Luana learnt how to use the tablet first from some family friends and then, from her father. Although there are no explicit rules regarding tablet time, her parents are careful this should not be excessive, by offering her spare time activities. Her mother’s only concern related to technology (except for that of excessive use) is a content-related one, so that’s why she activated the parental control settings for the Youtube. 2.2. Family RO02 A mountain town in the centre of Romania Family members • • • Mihaela, RO02m27, medium user Cornelia, RO02GM67, no user Delia, RO02g7, at the moment of the interview, she finished grade zero, medium user Narrative Delia lives with her mother, Mihaela and with her maternal grandmother, Cornelia, in a small town in the middle of the country, in a mountain area; although living almost together, they keep their finances apart. Before 1989, the town was a mono-industrial one (producing a mix of bicycles and ammunition), and once the factory absorbing all the population was shut down, the residents’ living standard deteriorated, newer and smaller factories and “I’d say she’d need a tablet, should she production units absorbing relatively have no playing resource, say. But fewer workforce than before. Mihaela, a she’s got enough to waste her time on. high school graduate, works in such a Anyways, most of the times we prefer factory; the last 6-7 months she worked mostly in Germany, her factory here playing checkers or reading books” having sent her to specialization and (mother, 27, RO02m27) then to working on a special machine in Germany (3 weeks there and one at home). While Mihaela was away, Delia was left in Cornelia’s care (retired from the old factory). Delia’s family lives in an old blockhouse for bachelors, in two studios they united through a common hallway and with access to common bathrooms. Mihaela came back to her mother’s after divorcing George, Delia’s father, three years ago. Her former husband remarried and at the moment of the 12 | 09 February 2016 interview with Delia, he expected a child from his new wife (at the moment of the interview with Mihaela, the kid was born already). During Mihaela’s absence, George tried to compensate and to be more present in Delia’s live, taking her at his home almost every weekend. The father and daughter have different activities together, a less common thing in the Romanian culture, where usually mother gets the child after the divorce, while father limits himself to rare visits of a couple of hours. Delia is a very sage and observant child, talkative – as her mother and grandmother describe her – and very competitive (her mother says), still without persevering in becoming better (e.g. she’s given up the chess extracurricular classes she took because, as a beginner, she couldn’t win the games against the more advanced kids in class). She’s friendly, plays outside in the little park in front of their blockhouse where she’s only supervised from the window, by her grandmother; she also likes to dance. As extracurricular activities, she goes to folkloric dances classes, once a week and recently to modern dance classes (but she prefers the first to the latter). When her mother’s at home, the two have different activities together, but it’s more like spontaneous excursions, going shopping or media related activities, including books: “Yes, I always have read to her. Not quite every night. Sometimes also during the day, when we were sitting on the bed. We still do have reading days. Or, often, when she sees me reading (…), she asks me, ‘What is it that you read? Read it out loud’ and I tell her, ‘Well, there are books you can’t read.’ And then I tell her, ‘Okay, I will read you a story and then you let me finish my book, let me read myself”. (RO02m27) Despite the recurrent phrase of her grandmothers’, trying to convince the researcher that “there’s nothing she lacks, her mother buys her all” (RO02gm67), the house is not that technologized. In the house there’s an old, broken desktop computer, a new laptop (bought the last Christmas), a DVD player and an old CRT TV set. Their internet connection is a cabled, broadband; the TV set is cabled as well. Mihaela has a smartphone (not that new; its OS has started to fail, making Delia hope that, when her mother will buy a new one, she’d get the old one), to which Delia has access for playing on it. There is also in the household an old smartphone without a charger, received by the grandmother, which is considered as belonging to Delia. So, in the rare moments in which this smartphone without a SIM card in it is charged, Delia uses it to take pictures and listens to music (but the only charger they had for it is her mother’s and she had it with her, in Germany, at the time of the interview). When she’s at her father’s, Delia’s got access to his desktop computer and at his smartphone. But George has installed on his devices mostly strategy and violent games that his daughter does not fancy much. In the past, for a few months, Delia has had access to her mother’s boyfriend’s tablet, but the girl was not that impressed – she only recalls a game she didn’t like much, as being too violent. The mother, though, remembers the girl having installed on that tablet a kid’s game (app). Although lately Delia expressed the desire of receiving a tablet, Mihaela is not keen on buying her one, considering that the laptop constitutes a sufficient entertainment resource: “Well, it’s not a matter of money, the tablet’s not excessively expensive. They’re not that expensive anymore. Neither the age, she’s not that young. But I told her, ‘You’ve got the computer, for the moment, that’s enough’. So she’s got a laptop”. (RO02m27) 13 | 09 February 2016 Unlike George, a passionate video gamer (‘he was worse than a child’), Mihaela uses the Internet especially for communication and socialization (her Facebook account stays logged on, on the laptop, even when she’s not in the country), sometimes for information seeking (not for social or political issues, but practical information on how to tend for a certain flower or where she could find a certain product) and for entertainment in family context (she listens to music with Delia). She declares herself confident in her digital technologies proficiency and teaches her daughter actively how to use them: “Well, at first, I showed her. She stood by me and saw. For instance, ‘Mom, how could I get to listen to Youtube music? I wanna listen to music by Violetta on Youtube.’ ‘Well, you type like that, you type Youtube and then you enter Youtube and then, on a small branch you can find Violetta videos. And now she’s doing it herself, she’s self-sufficient”. (RO02m27) Mihaela professional formation and working in Germany lately affected the way the two use digital technologies – communication having won the first place. Thus, each day, sometimes twice a day, Delia communicates with her mother via Skype (video calls), she being the one to initiate the call, since her grandmother does not know how to operate the computer and is very reluctant to learning that. For communication purposes she accesses many times a day her mother’s Facebook account (she’s allowed to) in order to look at the pictures the mother posts from the places she goes to (Mihaela posts such pictures especially for her daughter to see them). Aside communicating, Delia uses the laptop in order to play games – with princes and princesses, cooking or sawing/tailoring games. She plays these in the browser and gets to them by typing the address of the game website (she does not search for new sites each time). Also, she searches and listens to kids’ music and kid stories or fairytales on Youtube. She’s a Violetta fan and has a series of licensed objects (clothes, perfume, a toy microphone) and searches on Youtube and Facebook Violetta-related content. Online, she does not search for educational games, although she has a toy-laptop with such games which helped her, according to her grandmother, to learn letters, musical notes, numbers, etc. Delia is not technology passionate (she turns off the laptop when she gets ‘bored’) and prefers outdoor activities – yet, as long as she’s in, her TV set is always on, on a kids’ channel. Her mother is not especially worried regarding digital technologies, which she rather considers a good thing, but more as an entertainment means and sometimes as an information tool. Delia mentioned, however, that sitting at the laptop can be a bad thing, since your eyes or head may hurt (and she suggestively rubbed her eyes); yet, this seemed something she borrowed from the adults’ discourse more than her own experience. Although not having rigid or explicit rules, which she’d consider unnecessary, the mother is very present in Delia’s digital life, guiding her, helping her and even monitoring her (without the help of digital parental control). Besides communicating online when they’re apart, they have other technology related activities: they both play a game, on a shared account, on Mihaela’s phone or search together music on Youtube. Despite a small income and a lack of a university degree, Mihaela is a mother who is involved both in the online and offline life of her daughter, trying to offer her a good education and all the conditions for a good start in life, while offering her a certain degree of independence and intimacy. 14 | 09 February 2016 2.3. Family RO03 A mountain town in the centre of Romania Family members • • • • Ion, RO03f41, medium user Monica, RO03m41, low user Viorica, RO03gm, no user Maria, RO03g7, she just finished her second year at school (first grade). Narrative Maria (seven and a half years old) lives with her parents and her maternal grandmother in a house with an yard, near the local mountain (Piatra Craiului) in a small town in the middle of the country. Her parents re-did a part of the grandparents’ house recently, more like thermo-insulating it than an esthetic makeover. Thus, the house looks rather impersonal, lacking any kind of esthetic vision – at least of what we could see from it (not much, as we were received in the hallway where the computer was and in the daughter’s room). Although sharing the same yard, grandmother Viorica (retired, unknown age) has a room with separate entry and did not show up during the interview; she did not pop up in her granddaughter’s discourse, but did in her daughter’s (Maria’s mother), who admitted the girl is taken care of by the grandmother (taking her from school and controlling her home works) when they, she and her husband, are late from work, which happens almost daily. On the other hand, her paternal grandmother, Silvia, living in the closest big city, Brasov (27 km from their town), popped up in some of the girl’s stories, as she mentioned she goes to the kids’ park with her granny Silvia (parks and kids play area she says she lacks closer to her house). Thus, when she is at home, the girl plays with her neighboring kids, in the street much to her mother’s distress, due to the speeding drivers. Maria has no extracurricular activity, although she would like to attend a class of ‘creating things and drawing’, as she described herself as ‘very creative’. After school she attends the after-school, a paid program in the public school she attends, where she does her homework under her schoolmistress’ guidance. Maria’s activities with her parents are usually outdoor, trekking on the mountain or vacations where they go camping. Her cultural activities are generally school related or organized (once a month they go with the teacher to Brasov, to the theater) or with granny Silvia. The digital equipment of the house is ‘standard’, but minimalistic: a desktop computer where each member of the family has access (but used especially by the girl and her father), placed in the hallway, Maria’s tablet and her parents’ smart phones which they use for work (they both work in sales and photograph various shelving and stands they check and then send the pictures to the HQs). It’s interesting how Maria has quite a rigid representation of the correlation between various gadgets and the user’s age, expressing surprise that the researcher has a tablet, which she sees as an entertainment tool, unlike the smart phone, which she sees as a tool helping adults in work related activities. In the house there is a TV set and a DVD player – Maria knows how to use them, but she is not too interested in them. Her first tablet she received from 15 | 09 February 2016 a neighbor; it has a cracked screen; it was functional for a few months, and then broke completely. After a while – after “father changed his workplace”, as was perceived by Maria – her parents bought her a new tablet; yet, the father considers the money were not an issue, as a tablet for a kid does not need to be expensive or to have a lot of capabilities. The parents, both high school graduates, use the Internet via their smart phones to communicate work related business. The mother is uninterested in technology and relatively unsure of her digital competencies, openly delegating to her husband the task of mediating Maria’s relationship with the digital world. Still, she gets involved in her daughter’s tablet games, exchanging information and experiences: the mother taught her daughter how to play Candy Crush, the only game she played, and Maria introduced ‘Angela’ to her mother, a game her mother now plays from time to time on the daughter’s tablet, because she likes it and also as a strategy to keep Maria away from the tablet: “I tell her, leave it to me, I’ll tend to Angela’s needs for you” (RO03m41). The mother also has a Facebook account she only uses to communicate, privately, with her relatives and friends; Maria has access to her mother’s account and uses with the same purposes. Her father is much more confident in his digital knowledge and is actively involved in his daughter’s digital activities, mediating it technologically – he activated a parental control by setting an age limit, installed an antivirus, monitoring and cleaning up, periodically, her tablet, etc. – as well as advising and helping her to install the apps, to erase them, to prevent the tablet’s blocking, etc. Except for using digital technologies for work related purposes, Ion tried to mark down on Google Maps various tourist tracks with the pictures he made in various points, for other tourists’ use; he couldn’t get his photos to be visible and does not know why is that, but he thinks it is a good, beneficial thing that users should contribute to creating online content (one of the sites he really appreciates is Wikipedia). Before having the tablet, when she used to use the desktop computer more, Maria had her own dedicated folder on the desktop, with all the cartoons she could see. Thus, her parents’ had no concerns she might bump into inappropriate content. Back then, she started to play on some educational CDs. But ever since she’s got the tablet, her digital activities moved on it; they have a wifi connection in the house but she is not always connected on the internet; in order to protect the battery life, she switches off the tablet’s internet connection when she does not need it. Besides watching cartoons, she started – perhaps also because of her age – to listen to music on Youtube and, according to her father, to watch video content posted by other users. Thus, Maria seems to watch some vlogs of smart toys (“puppets talking with each other”, as RO03f44 described) and various craftwork tutorials she then tries to mimic. At the moment of the interview she had four games on the tablet and another one she had just installed, most of them mimicking-behavior type (Talking Angela, a gardening game, a tailoring game, etc.). Her tablet activities are complemented by watching TV – a kids’ channel and sometimes sports, with her father – and with many outdoor activities or ‘creative’ activities indoors. Generally she has no strict or explicit rules regarding the use of technology, neither content related (except for the ‘by default’ rule, no paid apps), or time of use rules, regarding duration, but her mother mentions several times her concern regarding excessive use and her strategies to keep the child away from it. It’s likely this kind of discourse is rather frequent in the family (as granny Silvia restricts her tablet use time), since Maria internalized it and knows that, should she look at it too much, ‘the eyes get broken’. Except for the excessive use and the inappropriate content, an issue they 16 | 09 February 2016 currently consider under control, her parents have no other concerns specifically related to the digital technologies. Her father, nevertheless, has a critical stance towards media in general and tries to give his daughter a media literacy crash course: to teach her the difference between image and reality, to pinpoint technical effects, or to show her instances of manipulation of information. Her mother admits she uses the tablet in a punishment-reward system, taking it from her every time she’s being punished, when her TV and computer time gets diminished. Still, these punishments or other time restrictions are followed by negotiations in which the mother quickly gives in. 2.4. Family RO04 A village near Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • • • Cornel, RO04f30, light user Dorina, RO04m28, light user Veta, RO04gm, no user at all Antonia, RO04g6, she finished the kindergarten and will start the first school year (grade zero), low user Mihai, RO04b10, he finished the forth grade, medium user Narrative Antonia lives with her parents in a village some 20 km away from Bucharest. Although near the capital, the life they live here is specific to the Romanian village: subsistence agriculture, raising livestock for food, there is no kindergarten with long hours for kids whose parents go to work, no hospital, nor pharmacy in the village. There are “Because, if I leave them for much only some small groceries, so that for longer, they would become addicts. anything else than food and household Because the kid, the longer he stays in items (thus for books, handbooks, magazines or computer stuff) one has front of the computer or the TV set, to go to the city, Bucharest, in this the more addict he becomes. Because case. Although they live with Veta, he learns to stay there. And also Cornel’s mom, in the same yard, isolated.” (mother, 28, RO04m28) Dorina says she does not trust her with her kids, given her mother-in-law’s alcohol problem. The interview was taken in July, and, for the first time since she had the children, Dorina was working again, as a jobber in agriculture, for the summer; once school was about to start, she was to cut job and come back to being a housewife (cultivating their land and raising animals) and a mother. Both parents graduated lower secondary school (8th grade); Cornel also works in agriculture, as a tractor driver. During the summer, when Dorina is not at home, Mihai, the older 17 | 09 February 2016 brother takes care of his sister, Antonia – and they both do house work (water the animals or do other small chores). Antonia attended 3 years of kindergarten and this fall she is to go to school and start grade 0 in a neighboring village. Mihai graduated primary school and is to attend his 5th grade in the same school as Antonia. For transport, their parents arranged with a neighbor who has children in the same school to give them a ride in his car. The family is poorly equipped with new technology devices; they own a CRT TV set and a desktop computer, both in the children’s room. The parents have access to both. The computer is connected to the internet (broadband). They considered installing a wifi, but the router would be an extra expense for the family budget (‘It’s not too expensive, but we still have to buy the router’ (RO04m28)). Mihai owns a smart phone and used to have a tablet, which broke after a few months (its screen broke). The parents have both mobile phones (but not smart phones). The computer was being repaired just yet – as it was virused enough so that the system needed to be reinstalled – sort of in view of the interview (when the researcher first contacted them, the computer was broken, but when we met, it was functional). A common practice in Romania, especially in villages and towns, installing various software or operating systems on home computers does not happen in authorized shops or at service providers, but is left to particular people known as ‘good at that’ or skillful; they usually come at one’s home and initiate the future users in how to use some piece of device or a technology. When Mihai received his smart phone, he had a subscription with a 3G connection, but, after a few months of very large sums on the monthly invoice to be paid for the internet traffic, the parents decided to move it as prepay; at the moment of the interview, he had a valid SIM, but not charged; thus practically, he has no internet access via phone, as in the village there is no public wifi he could access. Nor on his tablet he dad internet access, so he played exclusively the 2-3 games already installed on it when purchased. Antonia does not own any technology, but she has access to the technologies in the house and to the devices owned by her brother (to the tablet, when there was one, and to the smart phone) or to her mother’s phone, she uses it sometimes to take pictures or play games. Cornel is an infrequent computer user; he accesses it in order to listens to music or search information on tractors. Should he like a game the kids play, he would join them (e.g. Angry Birds). Dorina uses it even less, to search for information (e.g. recipes). Although she is less present online, she understands its functioning, knows the right terms and is well informed on her children online activities she supervises permanently, though, unobtrusively. She is watching what games children are playing, what they search; she knows better than Mihai the privacy settings of his Facebook account or if he talks to his friends over the chat or via comments and posting; still, she is not actively engaging: “No, playing together, no, since I don’t have the patience to sit and play with them, but I watch them play and the games they play. I enter there to see what it is all about, to understand. Also, on the phone, when he downloads it, I watch to see what was the game he’s downloaded.” (RO04m28) Antonia’s digital activities are decided upon, assisted and supervised by Mihai. Apparently, the two brothers negotiate the computer’s time of use, but the sharing does not seem fair: “I play one game and he plays a hundred” (RO04g6). But if there are two devices functional in the house, Mihai lets his sister use the one he doesn’t use at that moment: ‘But I let her play on my smartphone when I am on the computer’ (RO04b10). On the other hand, Mihai is the one helping her, showing her what to do, both on computer, and on tablet or smartphone: he puts on Youtube cartoons for her on the computer or shows her how to play games in his Facebook account, how to play phone games or how to search a thing (writing on a paper what are the words she should type in and, although she doesn’t know how to read yet, Antonia learnt how to write some key words). When playing 18 | 09 February 2016 alone on the computer, Antonia prefers the cooking games or the princess games to be played directly from the browser. On the tablet, when it was working, she used to play Candy Crush; on the phone, she plays Temple Run or “a game just like Minecraft, but not Minecraft, since the phone used to freeze on it” (RO04b10), as explains Mihai. Given the fact they do not have any friends around to play with, the two siblings play sometimes together on the computer, one against the other – some games Mihai prefers, fighting or racing. Before the computer got virused, Mihai has had a Facebook account he has made around 9, with his mother’s consent. It was a public account, where he had 64 contacts (relatives and friends); thus he got the virus that blocked the computer. After the incident he asked a friend to delete his account. Mihai used to post pictures of him and of Antonia; he received a lot of ‘likes’ for these. Antonia used to play various games on Facebook, with some of her friends in the village. The cooking games she mentions seem to be rather educational (kind of recipes for kids, with details such as quantities and precise steps and operations), but she limits herself to playing them mechanically, clicking where asked, without engaging herself or asking her mother to actually try and cook the recipes. Most frequently Dorina associated digital technologies with the idea of family use. Although she sees the internet rather in a positive light, as information (re)source for the kids (for history or geography, for instance), she is aware of its risks. Thus, without naming them as such, she mentions the inappropriate content (sexual and violent), grooming, excessive use or social isolation. Stating she trusts her kids, she admits nevertheless that those risks are present at all times and, when learning about parental control, she does not reject the idea of using it in the future: “It’s also the trust, alright. But one cannot know what goes on through a child’s mind. For instance, dunno, he hears something at school, a mate says, I entered on some site. (...) That’s why I don’t know about all this trust. The temptation is big. They hear from other children and are curious to see, what’s in there? Curiosity kills them.” (RO04m28) Although permanently supervising them and trying to limit their digital activities while she is at home (she says one hour a day, but it’s probably more), Dorina admits she has no control over her kids while at work. Still, generally she feels efficient in mediating her kids’ digital activities, by guarding them against issues such as addiction or isolation. 2.5. Family RO05 Bucharest, Romania Family members Alex, RO05f35, heavy user Gabriela, RO05fm5, heavy user Vlad, RO05b7, 2nd year in school (grade 1), heavy user • Florin, RO05b3, in the 2nd year of kindergarten, medium user Narrative • • • Vlad lives together with his younger brother, Florin, and their parents in a two room apartment (an open living room looking to the kitchen and a bedroom) in a new residential area in the outskirts of Bucharest. Although small, their home is nicely arranged and welcoming, with lots of sofas, toys and technology. Since their parents are relatively well off, they plan to move out in a bigger place in a year or two – a house they’re currently building. Once Florin was born, his maternal grandparents moved closer (three streets away) in order to help the parents. 19 | 09 February 2016 During the school vacation, the kids are staying either at their parental grandparents, or at their neighboring grandparents. The boys attend a public school and kindergarten in central Bucharest and an afterschool program until 4 p.m. Besides school, the boys take swimming lessons and do lots “After the first tablet broke, we didn’t buy of family activities: going to the another one. And last year, during the restaurant, to the cinema, etc. Their holidays, Vlad was really suffering he schedule is quite loaded, as they waste didn’t had a tablet, like all the kids. He’s two hours a day on the road, each day. got an aunt that loves him terribly and she Since he has been the first grandchild said, ‘Oh, how could we leave this child in both their parents’ families, Vlad suffer so?’ On Saturday we came back enjoyed special attention (initially from holiday and on Sunday we went and attending a private, English-intensive bought the iPad. This year, to prevent this kindergarten), visible in his self from happening, we bought the Samsung confidence: he’s talkative, open, for Florin.” ( RO05m35) merry and easily excited, constantly striving for the attention of the people close to him. Digital technologies are quite present in the house, each family member using it on a daily basis, for various purposes. Both boys have their own tablets, a bigger Samsung and an iPad mini – Vlad is even at his 2nd tablet, after Florin broke his 1st one, he had ever since he was three. The tablets are connected to the Internet via wifi and 3G, a connection they use while in the car or out in the countryside – but there was not too big a pressure to limit their 3G use – when the researcher visited, it was on and the mother did not worry about it. Also, Vlad has a smartphone (a cheap one, of small capabilities), he is only allowed to use only while in excursion or camps so that he could be in touch with his family. There is a PSP for the boys, which Vlad placed it in the top of his preferences for “being so small and easily to carry anyway” (RO05b7) although the mother says it only recently popped up back in Vlad’s preferences after months of neglect, and a portable DVD player, broken for the moment, but intensely used in the past, in the longer or shorter car trips. It was actually bought especially for Vlad, for a 2,500 km long car trip. In the house there’s also a play station (for which the father, also a gamer, bought a special wheel for the racing games), a Wii (bought sort of by error some years ago, when a colleague of Gabriela’s ordered two Wiis on sale), a laptop, a TV set, a DVD player and a home cinema audio system. Both the parents have a smartphone (iPhone), but the mother (a lawyer) is more of a fan, using it for relaxation in the empty moments during the day: ‘The phone is my favorite gadget! I have empty periods of time, in court, when I have to sit and wait for my turn; the most used are Facebook, Instagram and various games. Not Candy Crush, since I can’t stand it… anymore – but something of the kind. It only has a different icon.” (RO05m35) The boys have access to their mother’s phone and use it for films (Florin) and for games (Vlad), when they have no gadget with them in stand-by moments, while in the car or at their mother’s office, when she still has some things to do before going back home. Alex’s smartphone is Gabriela’s old phone, but he uses it more as a phone – days pass by before activating his data connection. Although not living together, the grandparents are important in boys’ lives and their way of using technology reflects upon the kids’ use of it: 20 | 09 February 2016 “During holidays, there’s also our grandparents’ appetite for technology in general. ‘Cause granny is a Candy Crush-addict and she’s more active on Facebook than me. Once she retired, she discovered technology. And the other grandparents of ours are living in the country side and, besides the fact there’s a poor reception of the Internet there, grandpa uses the Internet strictly with instructive-educational purposes, such as finding out how to plant something, tend for various plants; grandma is a little a-technical. She doesn’t use it and was never a fan of it. So with grandma it’s rather outdoor, physical activities and the only entertainment is cartoons, in the countryside.” (RO05m35) Both Alex and Gabriela use digital technology at work (“we’re staring at some screens all day”, as Gabriela put it), but also at home, for entertainment purposes, Alex having recurrent periods when he is developing a crush for a different game. Gabriela does online shopping, as she trusts the antivirus allowing her to go safely. They’re both university graduates, him being a sales manager at an auto dealer and her, a lawyer. The boys mostly use their tablets – Vlad mostly for games and sometimes for videoclips, while Florin, the other way around – and the TV set, accompanying their morning routine (‘I eat while watching cartoons’, says Vlad). At the moment of the interview, on their Samsung tablet, which now belongs to Vlad, after the boys have swapped them, there are four games, among which, FIFA (downloaded a day before) already reached the ‘favorite’ status. Instead, Florin’s mini iPad was full of games, barely functional; although Vlad learnt to manage his tablet storage space – “Some games I don’t use anymore I place here and erase them later” (RO05b7) – Florin “is at that moment when he learns that what does have a little cloud is easily downloadable, no password, no nothing and he enters the story and, if he sees the little icon he downloads it.” (RO05m35). When they’re at home, the boys’ tablet use is managed and mediated by their mother: “I only monitor them, not to let them get too far, but I don’t intervene. Still, from time to time I take tablets and control them, I clean them and see which are the games are ok to me and which ones are too violent and so, and I delete them.” (RO05m35) Vlad’s laptop activity is mediated by Alex. Anyways, after a short while, between the two tablets he has got, when Vlad was interested in the laptop and used to play games in browser, now he is only interested in playing games with his father, as they are both fans of The Lost Vikings and a train game where they have to build railway stations, tracks, etc. Florin does not use the laptop at all. In the past, when Vlad did not know how to delete the games, he has had (on his first tablet, also an iPad), many educational games Gabriela had installed on; she thinks these helped him with English; at that moment, Vlad also was attending an English intensive program in kindergarten and had no difficulty in watching English spoken cartoons. Many of these apps are currently on Florin’s iPad (these are “the-apps-with-asmall-cloud” Florin keeps downloading from App Store), but Vlad is no longer interested in them. The parents’ concern regarding digital technologies are related to excessive use and their possible repercussion on health – their dad would rather shut down their tablets during the night because of the possible harmful influence of wifi, and also eye-problems concerns– and also the violent content, an issue they consider they can manage for the moment being, through monitoring. These concerns are countered by their positive perception on technology; beyond its educational potential, Gabriela openly admits (also, partially shameful) that it helps her in parenting, keeping the boys quiet: 21 | 09 February 2016 “Yeah, that’s also that part, and I don’t feel proud (…). When we go some place, in a restaurant where you have to wait or something, we take some technology with us, a tablet, a phone, in order to keep them distracted, to keep them still and not to make a chaos around where we are – or at a very long trip”. (RO05m35) Technology is also used in a punishment-reward system. Although they do not have precise rules regarding usage time, there are content rules, the mother established, but these are negotiable, ‘according to how much I believe in them myself’, as she admits. To the restrictive mediation Alex would fancy, Gabriela counters her active mediation, teaching the boys how to manage the pop up ads, how to use their tablets efficiently, various tricks, etc. She is more willing to pay for the apps if the boy wants them, but not in order to get rid of the ads. 2.6. Family RO06 Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • Victor, RO06f47 – Heavy user Corina, RO06m37 – Medium user Petru, RO06b8, grade two (third year in school) – very heavy user Narrative Petru, 8 and a half years at the moment of the interview, lives with his parents in a three room flat in a relatively central area of Bucharest. Although his family was willing to participate in the research, Corina, his mother, was reluctant in giving the researcher access to their home, so the interview took place, in two stages, outside the house: first with Petru, the interviewing “I took him to the Army Museum; it was happened in the park, after school only me and him. Actually, there was not and, a few days after, the interview much to be seen. But I took him there with his father, Victor, took place in especially since he plays Minecraft and all the researcher’s office. With all sorts of things and said, ‘well, man, you those shortcoming, both interviews should see for yourself what that’s all proved very informative, giving up a about’. To get to understand the scale of pretty detailed image on the family things, to see the things for real” (RO06f47) and the role of digital technologies in the family’s life. Petru is almost always together with the family, as Corina is a stay at home mom and Victor works from home most of the time (he used to work in the media and now is a sound stage expert for various event; he also administers the Facebook activity for various small companies). His spare time, when the weather allows him, Petru spends outside, in the park 22 | 09 February 2016 near their house, with friends the same age as him or a little older (since he got 7, his parent left him go play alone, and explained to him they were lucky with that park so close to home, otherwise they should have taken him in a more distant park and supervise him all the time). Once a week, Petru goes to athletics trainings, but doesn’t seem excessively keen on going there. The parenting style is very open, as Victor stated openly he wants his boy to be a critical, independent thinking guy, who doesn’t take prefabricated opinions for granted. That’s why he invests a lot of time in Petru’s education and shows his disappointment and downright anger by the limitations of the cultural offer Bucharest has for kids – or kids-friendly adult culture: “I took him to the Geology Museum; I don’t know how many kids his age have been there, but he wanted it, so I took him there. (...) When he found out there’s a museum where one can see rocks, he said, let’s go! And I took him there. He looked, it was beautiful. I took him, but the whole museum thing is a bit disappointing, in Bucharest, in Romania. I’m gonna waste it if anybody ever tells me again, ‘Man, leave the damn tablet, get the kid to a museum or something”. I take him once, but the second time is not that easy to happen. I took him to the aviation museum; God forbid, they didn’t take our money at the entrance, since there was nothing there to take our money for. Their best exhibit items are thrown around, scattered in the courtyard! I took him to the History Museum, when the terracotta army was on exhibit; except the thesaurus and the column, the rest of it was closed for the public. Yes, I take him there, but if there’s nobody there to tell us a word? There should be taught so that they eagerly come back.” ( RO06f47) Without being overly technologized, the house leaves this feeling due to the fact all the family members use technological devices. Although Petru has ownership only of the tablet and the wii, he’s got access to all the gadgets and devices in the house. Thus, in the house they have three laptops: the newest belongs to the mother, who uses it exclusively for entertainment purposes; Petru also uses this one for playing Minecraft; the other two are used by the father, for work and for play. There are also two TV sets – a CRT one in Petru’s room (which he doesn’t use, since he’s in the living room all day, and during the night he’s in his parents’ bedroom, co-sleeping), and a LCD one in the living room –, a wii and a stereo. Besides these, the boy has a tablet and both his parents have smart phones. They also used to have a DVD player, which was broken (by a friend of Petru) and was thrown away, which is rather unusual for Romania, where broken equipment is kept for many years in the house and counted as existing items, its functionality only marginally considered. Petru got the tablet (the first one, now he’s at his second device) around 7, a gift from an aunt in Italy, but acquired by his parents from Romania. They chose a Romanian device (Utok), with good technical specs, a big screen and relatively cheap. The tablet was enough for the boy’s needs, but was left accidentally by the mother in the airport, this summer, while they were returning from Italy, so Victor bought a new one the very next day (same brand). Although Petru is a big gamer, he’s got a variety of online activities; all involving games, as he’s a passionate. In the games’ world and the worlds around it, he’s almost never alone: he only plays wii when his friends come over or when he’s with Victor, he talks with his real life friends about Minecraft and he also joined an online community (Minecraft Romania group) where he shows his buildings; he plays Sim 23 | 09 February 2016 City with Victor and reports to him each night, before going to bed, whatever he’s doing during the day and leaves the tablet to his father, so he could also build some more, etc. Due to his interest in games, Petru is active in the social media, with his own Facebook account, own Youtube channel and, of course, webmail accounts (on Gmail for the Android and on Yahoo, as it’s most used in Romania). He’s got very few Facebook friends, around 8, but he’s in the Minecraft Romania group (where he quickly added Victor) where his average comment rate is one per day; he usually shows his constructions there. He uses the Facebook messenger to communicate with his father (he did that during the summer, while he and his mother were in Italy for a month). Also, when he wanted to send a friend a larger file, he discovered and used Skype. He watches tutorials on the Youtube (for this, he subscribed to various channels, among which, that of his friend), in order to find the codes helping him build faster; he ‘remembers’ the codes by making screen captures. He wants to record and upload his own tutorials, but he waits, for this, to receive one of his father’s older laptops, when he would buy a new one. He understands how Youtube is working, he knows one can make money when gathering enough subscriptions (and is pretty realistic to admit that is a difficult road). Although perfectly conscious of his digital knowledge and literacy (‘I know how to install and uninstall things with my eyes closed, literally’ says RO06b8 laughingly), he really wants to know more on the way an operating system works: “To know the settings. To be able to solve everything through settings. Just as I know the codes. I mean, if you have a problem with the settings, which can only be solved by a professional guy, or something breaks at your computer and you have to fine tune the settings and all that sort of things.” (RO06b8) Regarding devices, he says, at one point, ‘more than anything, at this moment I want an Xbox” (RO06b8), but it seems that his desire was influenced by his friends, as his top preference is the tandem laptop-tablet, having nevertheless elaborated judgments on the Xbox games’ graphic and the type of Xbox games – “the Xbox is more about violent games. But there are also kids’ games there” (RO06b8). He’s got an antivirus on the tablet, he installed himself and a parental control installed by the father – who told him that this would eliminate irrelevant search results for his age, while searching for various things. As a general tendency, family 6 sees digital technologies as useful and normal in the context of life nowadays; Corina accepts Victor’s rationing, but is less convinced. That’s why they try to mold Petru to use it more efficiently. At the same time, they are perfectly aware of the potential risks or dangers online; Petru asks his father’s agreement or advice every time he needs it and receives constructive feedback from him (e.g. what to do when he receives a friend request from an unknown person on Facebook, or if he should accept various extensions of the games). Although he didn’t experience any nasty stuff, he knows he may, in the future. That is why he makes sure his Facebook account doesn’t betray his age. Although it’s not the case and is largely avoided, paying for the digital content is not totally excluded for family 6: Victor has paid for a Pottery app when Petru wanted many features than those available in the free version; first, the Minecraft was a bought version, afterwards, Petru discovered he can download it for free, from the Internet. 24 | 09 February 2016 2.7. Family RO07 Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • • • • • Stefan, RO07f38, heavy user Petronela, RO07m38, medium user Raisa, RO07gm, lives with family 7 for around 4-5 months per year, light user Ivan, RO07gf, lives with family 7 for around 4-5 months per year, heavy user Tudor, RO07b6, first school year, but because of his higher level of competences, he is going to go directly into next grade (grade one instead of zero), light user Horia, RO07b4, the third year (the last one) in the kindergarten, light user Viroana, RO07g0 (10 months old), no user Narrative Tudor lives together with his family (mother, father, a brother and a sister) in a four-room flat in a “I want to teach him to better use Bucharest blockhouse. Over the Google, but it’s frustrating because all summer, Petronela and the children he wants to search for requires live for quite a while at the knowledge of the English language.” maternal grandparents, in a town in the North-Eastern part of Romania; (father, 37, RO07f37) for another 2-3 months, the same grandparents are coming to Bucharest and live at Family 7, precisely to help Petronela and Stefan with the children. While at their grandparents, Tudor and Horia meet with their cousins, some of which reside in the US. Just like his father, Tudor is a big fan of cycling; it’s almost a year since he started to go to Aikido, a thing his father also did; Tudor has an asthma condition requiring frequent treatment (inhalations), which influences a great deal his daily routines. Thus, when asked how a typical day looked like, he answered with a question: “It depends. When I’m sick or when I’m not sick? If I’m sick, in order not to waste my time while I’m having my treatment, I don’t waste the time, but rather watch a film on the computer” (RO07b6). Yet, Tudor is not too keen on digital technologies, preferring to build with Lego blocks. In fact, Tudor and Horia are actually less in contact with the technology, having access to the desktop computer at home (or at their granddad’s computer while being there) and rarely to their parents’ smartphones, which they only use to take pictures. This may be done on the parents’ devices, which are not attractive for the boys – 25 | 09 February 2016 except for a chess game, Stefan does not have any other game installed on his phone, and Petronela’s phone is not that top of the line –, but also, as Tudor emphasizes, because he is not interested in video games. Besides the desktop computer, there are three more laptops in the house to which the boys do not have access (the mother’s, the father’s and another one which is… broken), a CRT TV set grandma Raisa watches when she’s there, the father’s DSLR camera – Tudor claims to know how to use it, while Stefan, critically denies: “He only takes it up to his eye and then pushes the button” (RO07f37) – and a Kindle, belonging to the father, who describes himself as “pretty gadgety type”. Given Stefan’s passion for music (he can play the guitar and has one for himself, and also bought one for the boys, who do not seem to be interested in it), they have in the house a top notch audio system and a stereo system in the boys’ room – practically, the only digital equipment totally dedicated to them. Stefan, as well as Petronela, are post-graduates in socio-humanities studies, him being a faculty member, while her works in the services (at the moment of the interview, she was in the maternity leave). They are both competent Internet users, using it mostly in work-related activities (Stefan even says he uses Facebook more to connect with his students), for information or other personal hobbies (such as music for him); they also use Skype frequently in order to keep in touch with the grandparents, their relatives abroad or even inside the family, when Stefan is away for conferences. Generally, when Tudor uses the computer by himself or with Horia around, he watches Youtube videos of various Lego constructions or, still informatively, in order to find out the code of various Lego kits and download building schemes. When his father or grandfather is near, he listens to music online. In the past they used to watch some Russian cartoons on Youtube (Misha and Masha), partly because the mother’s family is of Lipoven origin, but also because parents wanted to offer them an alternative to global and globalizing cartoons like the ones on Disney or Cartoon Network and did not expose them to those. As they entered collectivity, in kindergarten and then school, the boys “have learned there are other cartoons on TV”, as RO07m37 says, the boys shifting their preferences towards TV, in order to watch cartoons, leaving the computer behind. Although Tudor declares himself as not being interested in games, from time to time, when he’s with his cousins at their grandparents, he plays with them various computer games: “yahoo games, for instance; these are Flash games. That’s how the cousins knew how to find them. They knew how to play pool, or racing games. But they’re Flash games, very simple games, with two controls. And more of a competitive spirit, to do what his cousins do, he played as well. Because, otherwise, after they left, he wasn’t so much interested in them.” (RO07f37) These are corroborated by the fact that, when the researcher asked Tudor to show her the games, he said he does not remember how we got there. Horia, on the other hand, seems more interested in gaming, as he played all along during the researcher’s visit a Lego game on the researcher’s tablet which she gave to the boys in order to take some photographs of theirs toys. When they are at their grandparents, they also use the computer, browsing on various educational or drawing websites. Besides searching information online, Tudor is also creating content, making, with the help of his father, short movies in time-lapse photography of his Lego constructions; the boy takes the pictures (“100 pictures for 10 seconds of film”, explains the RO07f37), while the father processes and uploads, a big part of them, less than Tudor thinks, 26 | 09 February 2016 on Facebook. Through all his digital activities is obvious Tudor uses technology not for the sake of it, but in order to be together with his family, and to cater to his own interests, situated in the real world (he searches information on Lego and planes, another passion of his). Thus, although asked specifically if he listens to music online, he answered, much to his father surprise, that he doesn’t, although they listen to it together – but when the father chooses the music, the child perceives it only as an activity together with his father. The same, he plays chess on his granddad’s computer because his grandfather plays chess; he plays online games next to his cousins in order to have certain shared activities with them. But when the use of technology is individual and not familial, is totally subsumed to his offline interested and guided exclusively by these interests. The Internet offers Tudor information, first and foremost, so Stefan wants to teach him how to be as efficient in searching: “Today, even: he wanted to search the Lego code of a particular kit; it was pretty difficult to start looking through all their website. And I told him, let’s try differently. We open the Google page and I made him write, upon dictation, Lego, train station. And he was a little surprised, why writing g-o-o-g-l-e and ‘train station’ and you don’t write in Romanian and so on. And I explained to him, in English you write different than you speak.” (RO07f37) Both the parents, and the grandparents prefer an active mediation to the restrictive mediation (unlike the parents of the US cousins who imposed explicit time of use rules for the digital technologies); the boy is clearly guided in his online adventures: when asked to show the researcher how he performs the searches, he was able to translate each step into words, much like he was probably told and explained (including alternative options such as, ‘let’s say we don’t find…; so then we go…’). His grandfather, also using the technologies for his own interests (he’s digitalizing Russian religious books for the Lipoven community in Romania), had introduced the boys to starfall.com, an educational website he’s heard from his American grandsons. Thus, playing on starfall.com, Tudor first learnt the English alphabet, and only then the Romanian one, this preventing him at some point from learning how to read as he used to pronounce each letter in English. Regarding the content they access, Stefan still prefers an active mediation, trying to teach the boys how to be critical in their relationship to the media and using evaluation criteria which are intrinsic to the audiovisual show, and not commonsensical criteria. 2.8. Family RO 08 Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • • Marian, RO08f26, medium user Alina, RO08m26, medium user Doina & Vasile, RO08gm43 & Ro08gf44, light users Felicia, RO08g6, first school year (grade zero), medium user 27 | 09 February 2016 Narrative Felicia and her parents live together with the maternal grandparents in a house in the outskirts of Bucharest. Up until a few months ago, Cristina, her mother’s sister, also lived there. She has played an important part in Felicia’s life, as the Auntie-who-used-toindulge-her (in the rare occasions the parents said no). The three of them live in one room, sharing kitchen and other domestic spaces with the grandparents, who spend a lot of time with Felicia. Alina is a stay at home mom ever since the child was born, taking care of her daughter. Marian is an electrician and, besides work (he’s got a stable employment) services around domestic clients, which allows him to spend quite a considerable amount of money on the various costly toys Felicia wants after she sees them in TV commercials. None of the parents graduated high school, Alina having finished 11 grades, while Marian finished his 10th grade. Felicia, who was six years and one month old at the moment of the interview, is a talkative, chubby “She never downloaded anything for little girl, used to be the family’s money. She asks, once in a while, but I focal point and, more than that, to said no! Browse through the free games have Alina at her disposal (‘mom, and choose one of those.” (mother, 26, water’, says at one moment, during the interview and her mother gets up RO08m26) and fetches her the water). Felicia does not make any sports, although she’d like to attend ballet lessons and Alina is in search of a close by studio to get her, but, since they live at the edge of the city, they have difficulties finding such a studio. Given the lack of kids’ playing grounds near by, Felicia spends her time in the street, with the neighboring kids or in the house, watching TV or playing on the tablet. Sometimes her friend, Oana (11 years old), comes around and they listen to music on the tablet or play together. There are many TV sets in the house, among which a new, LCD one, in the room the three of them live; a DVD player, a stereo and a desktop computer that broke a couple of months before the interview. Felicia has a tablet (an Android one, with an antivirus on it) and has, but no longer uses, an interactive laptop and tablet (‘toys’). Both her parents and grandparents have each their own smartphone; Alina’s got an iPhone 4, with a broken screen and Marian, an Android phone. They have a wifi internet connection in the house; the only one with a 3G device is the father, the rest of the family is considered as not in need of such a thing, since they’re in the house, most of the times. The father tends to buy Felicia anything she wants or might want in the future, while the mother is rather reluctant when it comes to buying things, judging them most of the times in relationship with the real need of such an acquisition, according to the costs, the child’s age, the type of use, etc. Thus, the computer was bought by Marian when Felicia was around one year old: ‘it was for her. Her father bought it. He said, ‘leave it there, for when the girl would grow’! Yes, he’s got that idea. That she has everything and lacks nothing. Since she’s the only kid!’ (RO08m26). 28 | 09 February 2016 When Felicia was around 4 she wanted a tablet and Marian bought her an iPad, much to Alina’s dissent; she considered it was too much an expensive device for such a small child. Pretty soon Felicia broke the screen while stepping on the tablet she’d left on the bed. Marian accepted to buy her a new one, but a cheaper one. They thought ‘Santa Claus’ might bring Felicia a laptop she really wants ever since the computer broke. She also wants a smartphone, buy Alina was able to step in and delay the buying of such a device, on the consideration Felicia is too young and doesn’t need a phone yet: “And him, I mean, he really wants to buy her a phone! To call him, to play games on it. I told him, ‘man, you really have nothing else to do with you money?’ ‘Well, let the girl have a phone’. I don’t know, but I think she’s too small for a phone. She already has a tablet.’ (RO08m26) Even if she does not have her own smartphone, Felicia has access to all the smartphones in the house; she plays games on them until she empties all the batteries; the same for the phones of their visitors (i.e. her aunt or uncle, the godmother etc.): “Yeah, as soon as Cristina or her husband show up, it’s a known fact: phone check. ‘Let me see what games you have’. ‘Can I play, too?’ ‘Can I install this game?’” (RO08m26) Alina uses the internet mostly for Facebook and for searching for various other things she is interested in, such as cooking recipes. For this she uses her phone or Felicia’s tablet, permanently logged in on Facebook. She considers herself not very skilled in using mobile devices (and in fact she does not have other email, Skype or Instagram accounts) and acknowledges that, many times, she learns from Felicia. Marian uses the internet in order to search for various parts he needs for his job and sometimes for some gaming; he does not have a Facebook account and uses from time to time his wife’s account. All the family, including the grandparents, tend to consider Felicia as the most adept in using mobile technologies; they appeal to her for various things (such as, how to exit a game, delete a picture, set a background picture, etc.). Games occupy the biggest part of the time Felicia spends with technology, but she does not have any favorite game to which she would dedicate more time. She uses role playing games (such as, at the shop) and also games where she has to take care of an animal, princess games (that she has to dress, put make up on, etc.), Temple Run or Candy Crush – but, as Alina says, she easily gets bored. Rather than a certain kind of game, Felicia is more interested in the characters appearing in the games, naming the game after the name of the character. Not being attached to a particular game and always searching for new games, she is caught in a mere searching activity, which becomes the main purpose; given the limited space available, deleting ‘old’ application is also a frequent activity. She also watches Youtube videos, where, along the classical fairytales, she loves to watch the various promotional pieces on Violetta, from Kinder Surprise. She is a fan of the TV show, watching the episodes each evening, religiously, with Alina besides her. She likes the commercials, the TV ones, as well as those on the tablet – and often asks for the products she sees there. As she does not know the letters or numbers, she’s assisted by the mother in her searches – or she browse from link to link, from suggestion to suggestion. Felicia has access not only to her mother’s phone, but also to her Facebook account: she watches the pictures, ‘likes’ the pictures regarding her, posts pictures 29 | 09 February 2016 taken by her with the phone or with the tablet (of pets, of her or of her friends outside); once she sent a smiley to her school mistress. Alina looks at this with much forbearance and is not bothered by the girl’s intrusion (as the Facebook account seems to be rather a ‘family’ space, and not a personal one) and shows no particular concern towards Felicia’s Facebook use, as long as it does it from Alina’s account and not from her own. Her only reaction is to delete some pictures Felicia posted. Also, the child uses the Facebook messenger in long chats with close relatives and with friends from the neighborhood – people she sees in her daily life. Although on her tablet, for shorter periods of time, there are educational games she downloads herself (a drawing application or a piano playing one) or downloaded by the mother (a math operations app), the tablet is seen in the spare time, playing time, paradigm – opposing to the school-learning-educational paradigm. Both Alina and her daughter seem to not be aware of the possible risks, Alina’s only generic concern being focused on the pornographic content her daughter might accidentally get to be exposed to. There are no explicit rules for the new technologies, since Alina consider that, once she is always close by, she can adapt on the spot and permit, and sometimes even suggest her daughter to use the tablet in order to kill her boredom. In the same adaptive key, Alina admits that she uses the tablet in a punishment system for the (rare, she says) moments when Felicia does not obey her. Although the parents – especially the father – are ready to buy her whatever device she wants, the only restriction she has is installing apps for money. 2.9. Family RO09 Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • • Petre, RO09F27, medium user Georgiana, RO09M29, medium user Daniel, RO09b6, first school year (grade zero), heavy user Rada, RO09g1, light user Narrative Daniel (six years and a half) lives with his parents and his sister Rada, 22 months old, in a social apartment in the outskirts of Bucharest, in a new and not quite accessible residential complex. This limits Daniel’s activities drastically to going to school and sometimes to getting to his grandparents, who live in the city. As the kindergarten is not compulsory and as a result of the access difficulties, in the previous school year, after one month of getting him to the kindergarten, Georgiana decided to give it up. In the complex there is no playground, so Daniel didn’t get to make but 3-4 friends, out of whom Silviu is the only one coming over from time to time, to play with Lego building blocks or with digital technology. Also, in weekend and in vacations, his cousin Ana (8-9 years old) stays with them, so the two cousins get to play together. But besides this shortcoming related to the 30 | 09 February 2016 access, their two room apartment is welcoming, neatly furnished and very clean. Daniel is a quiet and reserved boy, also very shy, excessively attached to his mother who tries to cut the chord and make him go on his own ‘Do you talk with your class-mates in certain situations. Still, Daniel about video games?’ (researcher) does not seem to give up that easy ‘Only when we meet and get his dependency, continually acquainted. I don’t know too many expressing a naïve, unknowing status: during the interview he people yet, but I will befriend some said at least 20 times that he does more.’ (boy, 6, RO09b6) not know one thing or another, with a strong phrasing (with an accent on the I, usually absent in Romanian phrasing). He’s also disturbed by the loud environment in school. Despite the fact Georgiana declared they had a low income per household, that was one of the most technologized houses in our panel (the only one with a smart TV), easily explainable by the father’s appetite for films and music for which he uses the newest devices possible, and on the other hand by the fact that Gelu, the mother’s brother, who lived in the US for a few years, sent them over a lot of technological devices for Daniel. Thus, the family possesses a smart TV and a CRT TV, two DVD players, a Home Cinema, an old desktop computer, now broken (which they don’t plan to fix any time soon), two tablets (an iPad and a Samsung), two PSPs, one Play Station and two smart phones. There’s a wifi connection in the house. They also plan to buy a Wii game console. There are no books in the house (Daniel mentioned they had some at school), nor children magazines. Yet, the family is centered on the boy, whose demands are easily satisfied (“every time he sees a Lego, he starts, ‘Mom, will you get that for me? Will you?’, and I must get it”, RO09m29), sometimes also ‘buying’, this way, the promises he would fulfill even those things undisputable in other families, such as going to school (“I told him I’ll get him anything, provided he goes to school!”, RO09m29). This results in a perception that all the technology in the house is the property of Daniel (the two tablets, the two PSPs and the Play Station) or at least something for his use: to the question, if there is a TV he and only he uses to watch to, Georgiana answers laughing: ‘The smart one. When we want to watch the news or whatever and tell him to let us watch it (on the smart TV), he asks us, ‘but why, isn’t there any other TV in the house?’ (RO09m29) The Samsung tablet was bought by the family, besides the iPad uncle Gelu had sent, in order to facilitate Daniel’s access to the games, since there are more free apps in the Android Magazine Play than in Apple’s App Store (and they didn’t connected their bank accounts’ details to none of the tablets’ app stores accounts). If the tablets were bought on purpose, the two PSPs Daniel owns were the result of a confusion between the parents and the uncle – they both bought a PSP as a gift to the boy, and forgot to tell the others. Although Daniel has a smartphone of his own, the phone is now used by Georgiana, after her phone broke; but since the boy is continuously with his mother, since her maternal leave, he really doesn’t need a phone and only plays on it when no other device is at hand. 31 | 09 February 2016 The parents use digital technologies exclusively for loisir purposes – the father for films and music (the smart TV and the Home Cinema) and the mother, for games (Candy Crush and Solitaire, a game Petre uses to play, also) and Facebook (for which she uses the ‘big tablet’, meaning the iPad, while Daniel prefers the ‘small tablet’). When Gelu was living in the US, they talked to him on Skype or on Facebook. None of them uses technology for work related purposes – Petre, a vocational school graduate is an electrician and Georgiana, a high school graduate, a hotel maid. Although Georgiana declared at the beginning of the interview she knows nothing about technology and she’s not interested in it, she’s still involved in Daniel’s digital life, playing together various games on the Play Station, knowing all the favorite games or cartoons of the boy’s or helping him search various things on Youtube – they access either from the tablet, or the smart TV – since Daniel doesn’t know letters or numbers just yet. But for technical difficulties such as the tablet is frozen when lacking any free space, the connection needs to be reworked or a game needs to be deleted and/or installed on the ‘big tablet’, Petre is the one helping his son. On the ‘little’ one, the Samsung, Daniel is self sufficient. Daniel spends a good portion of the day in the digital world, alternating games – which he plays on the PSP or on the tablet – with periods of watching tutorials on how to play Minecraft (starting 8-10 months ago, when he discovered the game) or cartoons on Youtube he accesses from the tablet or from the smart TV. Except for the Minecraft and the GTA (which he only has on the PSP and he is upset he cannot download it on his tablet, since it costs a lot), the rest of his tablet games are easy, repetitive games – while the strategy games or those whose missions he could not accomplish he’d rather delete. Although he says he does not like music, on his preferred tablet, the Samsung, he has several apps with various musical instruments he installed himself; he rarely accesses them. Also, he has a math game his cousin Ana had installed and used exclusively; he does not access it because dos not know the numbers. On the iPad he had and used almost a year before having received the second tablet there still are some of the educational games (e.g. recognizing shapes and colors) Petre had installed for himself, games he now shows to his younger sister, who is still much too young to play them. Although a Minecraft fan and watching videos posted by other users, he doesn’t seem especially skillful, as he does not seem to get to build different things and does not seem to know about the existence of codes. Digital technology is seen exclusively under the sign of entertainment in Family 9. In this context, mother’s concerns are expressed towards the excessive use and to a lesser extent to the porn content the kid might get to download unknowingly (they had this kind of experience when the desktop computer was still functional and Ana was using it). Yet, this kind of risk is not seen as sufficiently present as to require any kind of parental control (Georgiana was not aware such thing existed and was explained during the interview). Violent content is not seen at all as a concern, while ‘time of use’ rules are not applied. Though, digital technology is used in a punishment-reward scheme, with the punishment more the threat of a punishment. Although very attached to his mother, most of the time Daniel watches videos by himself, perhaps also because Georgiana often uses digital technologies as a baby sitter, on Daniel and on Rada as well: ‘But not very often. Only when she was whining and didn’t let David play his PSP we trick her by giving her a tablet. She only makes like that (waving chaotically, nAV) and that’s all.’ (RO09m29). 32 | 09 February 2016 Technological gadgets are also useful for the ‘dead’ time while going to the grand parents (under an hour with a couple of buses), but only under close supervision from his parents’ part, who are afraid he might lose the tablet or get robbed. His Cousin Ana’s tablet was stolen while at school and she’s used, now, as an example of what might happen. 2.10. Family RO10 Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • • Cornelia, RO10m39, light user Paulina & Gheorghe, RO10gm & RO10gf, no users Iulian, RO10b5, first year (grade zero in school), light user Radu, RO10b6, second year (grade one in school), light user Narrative Iulian (5 years, 10 months) lives together with his older brother Radu (almost seven when interviewed) and his mother “Yes, I showed them how to use in a small house, freshly built, in the Word software. ‘Come here and outskirts of Bucharest. The kids’ father learn how to write your own and her husband died suddenly of name, your address, some heart failure in the summer, which numbers” (mother, 39, RO10m39) left the mother responsible for the whole house and kids. Cornelia is helped by her parents, living in the same yard, in their old house – they bring the children to and from school and supervise them until the mother comes home from work. Although the boys are very good boys near Cornelia, when it comes to theirs grandparents they are more inclined to negotiate the rules and even broke them. The grandparents play no role in their digital lives. When they are supervised by the grandparents, the boys are not allowed to use the computer – Cornelia’s rule – partly because technology is alien to them and partly because the mother wants to control their computer use time. During the vacation, the boys are going to their paternal grandparents, somewhere in the countryside, where outdoor activities prevail over watching TV: “We try more original entertainment activities! Like cycling, swinging, playing with broken tools”, says RO10b6 emphatically. When we first contacted the mother over the phone, after having recruited her through school and she’d agree, she said that very day she was planning to go buy tablets to the boys, as the winter was near and she needed them busy in the house. So we set the visit for after a few days, precisely to give the boy the time to get acquainted with the tablets, but when the researcher got there, the mother said she chose to postpone giving them the tablets for a few 33 | 09 February 2016 days, namely, until Radu’s birthday (a few days on). So, although at the moment of the interview the tablets were being bought for the boys, they didn’t use them and theoretically didn’t even know about them, though they seemed to suspect something. Besides those gifts looming in the horizon, they have an old laptop, which ‘was in the house since forever’, as the mother said and an old smartphone, which used to belong to the mother and now is used by the boys; the smartphone has the screen broken and does not have a SIM card in it. There are also two TV sets – on older CRT one in the boys’ room and a LCD, downstairs, in the living room; the latter is connected to the DVD player. In the house there is a wifi internet connection. Also, the mother has a new smartphone the kids do not have access to anymore, after Iulian broke the screen of the first one, when it was still being used by the mother. Besides the laptop, which they can only use in their mother’s presence and with her previous agreement, the boys have unlimited access to the rest of digital devices and juggle between those in a sort of mutual and unproblematic agreement: ‘I hear what’s on TV, but I am not in the room. When they were little boys it was more difficult, they were a handful. But not anymore. They search by themselves. If one of them doesn’t like what’s on TV, he comes downstairs and plays a DVD. One sits upstairs, the other, downstairs’. (RO10m39) According to Cornelia, technology is like a bad-weather-device, used especially when it rains, as in the summer the boys prefer to play outside, with the kids from the neighborhood, in the street (given that the street is at the edge of the neighborhood, thus, not that circulated). As extra-curricular activities, Radu already attends chess classes; Cornelia watches out to find out what the inclinations of her other son, Iulian, might be, so he could start taking some extra classes. During the interview, Cornelia explicitly expressed the desire of giving her boys more opportunities, and the regret of being far from downtown, which doesn’t allow her take them out of the neighborhood’s culture; she understands that, as a single mother, she would have difficulties managing them later. Cornelia, a high school graduate, works as an administrator, uses the computer very little for her own needs (‘in order to find an address, an information or so’) and declares she doesn’t use it at work. But then from the discussion it seems that she uses it for various small operations she didn’t thought of initially, as she understood ‘the use of computer’ as in programming. Though she has a Facebook account, permanently logged on both on the computer and on the old smartphone, she doesn’t use it that much: ‘I am not like everybody: I cook something and I put it there. When I took Radu at the chess club, the first day at the chess club, I put that on FB. But afterwards I didn’t post a thing.’ (RO10m39) Yet she is familiar with software suites such as the Office, she understands the functioning of the Internet and even of the games, so all along the interview she helped Iulian get his way through the game he was trying to play. Even before she remained the only parent, she was the one helping the boys with the technology. The boys’ use of technology is sort of atypical. On one hand, they are the only ones in the Romanian panel using Word (be it for play), writing various lists of important family members (when I got there, Iulian had just made such a list) or, as Radu showed the researcher, who knew how to use Google on voice command (on smartphone); also, they are among the few autonomous users of the DVD player. On the other hand, they are poor players; Iulian, presented by the mother as more savvy than Radu in what concerns the use of technology constantly needed help in order to play a rather simple game, 34 | 09 February 2016 but with controls on the keyboard. The both use the smartphone every day, watching cartoons or playing various games, but the range of activities is limited by the phone poor specs: at the beginning of the interview they had three games on that phone, and, in order to download and install a not too large game Radu had recalled (Sub Surfer), he had to delete two of those three. Although they only have one device, they don’t fight over it, and negotiations are the ‘you play five games, I play five games’ type. The laptop, morally and technologically dated, is used only seldom, also when the mother’s present, for game playing activities. Simple games, car racing games are preferred – also, they prefer playing online to downloading and installing games. Both boys know the letters, at least the capitals, they learnt from their mother, browsing through books. But they are not that keen on reading, they would rather write, a thing we’ve also noticed at Family 01, where Luana was writing stories, but didn’t want to read stories. The boys are neighbors and friends with Ioana, RO11g6, who was also a kindergarten colleague of Iulian and a colleague in school; she’s very important in the boys’ digital life, since she tells them stuff about various games they will try as well. On neither device they have parental control, the mother know nothing about but also doesn’t want it, as she prefers the boy would obey her words. The excessive use is her only concern and she admits there might be problems in the future, with the tablets. But the rules are momentary (e.g. ‘you are allowed one more game and then you shut down’) and not negotiable. The mother prefers to teach the boys how to use the technology more efficiently. Even though Cornelia taught the boys how to use the Word application, it was not under the educational auspices, but rather entertainment. Thus, it did not occur to her to search for educational apps with letters and numbers, just as she didn’t think to search for some chess apps for Radu. Although both the boys see technology as a positive thing, with no potential problems attached, Iulian is really excited about it and is willing to own as many devices (he wants a tablet, a PSP, when he finds out what that is – and even a new smartphone). Advocating an active type of mediation, through which she wants to make the boy internalize the rules, Cornelia is pretty strict in what concerns obeying the rules; she protested when the father once made the proposition of hiding the laptop to prevent tempting the children: “My husband wanted to put it away and hide it. And I told him, don’t hide it, leave it in plain sight.’ I don’t hide it anymore. If you’re allowed to use it, you are. If no, no. And that’s the end of discussion.’ (RO10m39) Although the mother insisted Iulian is better than Radu in using technologies, the researcher’s perception is that the boys cannot be compared, as their approach of technology is different: while Iulian is easily excited and is brave enough to try new things, he will not go deeper; Radu prefers to come back to activities he already tried and to repeat them until he gets hem right. Iulian is also more inclined to show his brother how to do certain things, due to his rather more extrovert nature, while Radu is lacking confidence in himself and asks for help, even if the next minute he finds the solution himself. 35 | 09 February 2016 2.11. Family RO11 Bucharest, Romania Family members • • • • Costel, RO11f41, light user Geta, RO11m37, light user Ioana, RO11g6, first year in school, grade zero, medium user Elena, RO11g11, fifth grade in school, heavy user Narrative Ioana and her family live in a new house they build in the outskirts of Bucharest, which influences a great deal the kids’ play habits – “In the summer they don't even charge most of them playing outside, as the the tablets’ batteries. They are on the area is car-free – and also limits street all day, playing, jumping rope, theirs extracurricular activities, playing hopscotch... Now, that the which Geta expresses with a regret, weather put us all in, they turned on as in the area there are no cultural or their tablets.” (mother, 37, RO11m37) educational landmarks for kids. Family 11 are neighbors of Family 10, Ioana being Iulian’s desk-mate and a friend of Iulian and Radu, which she visits often. The TV set is the most frequent device in the house – “the bathroom is the only place we don’t have any”, says Geta (RO11m37) – and gives the two girls a pace of life, since each of them has a favorite TV series they never miss in the evening (for Ioana, it is Violetta, while Elena watched it when it was first broadcasted, a few years ago). In the house there is a DVD player the girls use to watch cartoons or kids films, and also video recordings of various events in their life (e.g. from the weddings they have been). This pattern of using technologies in order to capture, preserve and revisit important moments (festive occasions, where the family reunites) was also present at Family 2. In the house there is also a desktop computers, ‘as old as Elena’ (11 years old) and a newer laptop computer, not very powerful, yet, good enough for the family’s needs. Elena’s got her own smartphone, bough two years ago; the last Christmas, each girl got her own tablet. Neither of the parents has a smartphone or any mobile digital device. In the past Ioana had access to her sister’s phone, which she used to play various games, but she lost the access once when, frustrated as she couldn’t perform something in one game, she bit it and scratched it. The parents, both 10 grade graduates, are not much of Internet users, neither for work, nor for loisir. Costel, an electrician, used to search and order various parts online, from 36 | 09 February 2016 the desktop or laptop. In one of these occasions he created a Facebook account, but he does not use it and forgot the password. Rarely, he also searches online the scores of various sports games. In order to install some antivirus on the girls’ tablets he turned to somebody ‘skilled’. Geta says about herself that she does not have the time, she does not know how and she does not like and care to use digital technology. After she stopped working, for nine years, to dedicate herself to raising the children, now (as ‘the times required it’), she resumed her activity as a housekeeper and cleaning lady. At some point she has had an attempt to come closer to technology, but she gave it up as she perceived those activities as a waste of time and felt guilty about the time spent playing: Ioana: “Remember when you used to ask me how to do a thing at that game?” (RO11g6) Geta: “Yes, honey, I do. I wanted to enter your world! (and to the researcher) I gave it up because I didn’t want to neglect them over the games.” (RO11m37) It is obvious that especially the mother, but also the father, perceive the digital technologies in their playful form as an alienation of the childhood, pointing out several times that it is used as a sort of substitute – for the real ‘childhood games’ that happen outside, in the street – but only when the bad weather keeps you inside. Yet, for Ioana, the technology seems to be naturally intertwined with the ‘real life’; during the interview, she kept holding her favorite plush sheep (the one she has chosen to represent her in the report; see the picture above) in one hand and the tablet in another. May be that is because the girl started using the internet and the computer while she was a toddler. Up until her tablet, she used to play on the computer or laptop either online games, straight from the browser (e.g. cooking games), or educational games, from CDs, which she installed herself, ever since she was two, says the mother. Also she used to watch cartoons she accessed from Youtube, starting her search from Google (e.g. Pepa the Pig) or listened to ‘music for children’ she google-searches verbatim. Now that she has her tablet, she rarely plays on the computer (once a month, maybe), but only for the games she still has on CDs. On the tablet she prefers the Moy games (she was having the Moy Zoo when interviewed, but said the first game Elena installed on her tablet was Moy 3). She had discovered recently, via an older friend (12 yo) the Star-Girl type of games which introduce her in the glittering universe of commercialism and consumerism, perhaps a little too sexualized for her age, an universe which fascinates her: she told the researcher for over a quarter of an hour all the options of the game, despite the repeated attempts to divert the discussion away from it. Yet, given the limits of her understanding of English, her approach of the game was rather intuitive and erroneous – she did not get that, in order to win more ‘lips’ (a currency in the game), her avatar had to provide various services indicated by a placement office (e.g. to model for a fashion show) and thought, that it is all about staying or being in a place and wining lips: “if I stay here I win the most lips in one hour” (RO11g6). She is more skillful to the games more appropriate to her age (the ‘run’ type of games), as she was the one telling others, such as the brothers in Family 10, how to play them. On the tablet she watches Youtube videos presenting Kinder Surprise toys, which she considers it’s ‘only natural’ that her parents buy to her when going shopping. She knows how to take pictures and films with the tablet and does so, to herself (selfies), to Elena or even to an aunt living across the street and keeping Ioana at her place until one of Ioana’s parents got to get home. When she was little she had a toy laptop with various educational apps on it; she does not use it anymore, as her parents consider it ‘dated’, while she sees it as ‘boring’. According to her mother, she knew the numbers already by the age of four, but not a result of using 37 | 09 February 2016 technologies, merely by sitting near her sister while she was doing her homework. She knows the letters, but does not like reading (as Geta put it, she ‘reads’ the pictures to herself) and cannot form words out of random letters, as the researcher noticed when Ioana tried to play a game with letters on Elena’s tablet. Ioana has no educational apps on the tablet, whilst Elena uses it for school purposes (‘only for school’, says Geta), searching definitions, translations or various literary works online. Elena has a Facebook account, where Ioana enters now and then; she’s only looking around, as she’s not allowed to be active there. The parents delegated to Elena a big part of the responsibility of teaching Ioana how to use technologies, including that of monitoring her younger sister’s installed apps content. The family 11 sees technologies in a dual manner: ‘destructive’ on one hand, while ‘necessary’ on the other, for educational purposes, by quickly delivering access to information. The two sides are never expressed together, though. The mother’s concerns regarding technology are focused on the excessive use (always happening to other people, not to themselves) which can rob them of their childhood, and also on the obscene and pornographic content, perceived, again, as non-specific to her own children. The latter of the concerns is less of a real threat now that they don’t access any games via Google, on a computer. Ever since Elena got her Facebook account, her mother monitors it (“I permanently check her conversations and all that she says” (RO11m37), but does not express any special concern towards this application, a natural continuation of her perceived role as a parent, in total control over her kids’ life. Violent or horror content also doesn’t concern her, considering that her girls will stop watching, should something bother them. Half jokingly, half accusing, she told the researcher how Ioana once broke the computer (which was, most likely, virused, but she perceives the guilt as belonging to Ioana) and another time, how Ioana broke the tablet’s screen; she thus seems more concerned with the physical integrity of the devices. Although the father claims the existence of some pretty clear rules for the use of technology, in order to impose the image of a good parent, the parental mediation style of this family is rather implicit, focusing pretty much on self-regulation and on sibling mediation: “Not that we’d forbid them, but they don’t feel the need. As they simply find something else to do” (RO11m37) “They learnt their own part, how much to see, what they’re allowed and what they’re not allowed (to do). Even if a small icon with a little bit of vulgarity pops up, they already know it’s not allowed and they are not curious. And she was taught a lot of things by Elena, who’s a special kid, in that respect. She shows her, she teaches her.” (RO11m37) Yet, the mother recognizes she uses technological devices as a reward, and rarely as a punishment (more the threat of a punishment). 38 | 09 February 2016 3. Findings 3.1. How do children under the age of 8 engage with new (online) technologies? 3.1.1. The devices The 11 families in the Romanian sample display very diverse technological devices’ ownership or access by the children, ranging from a desktop computer where the child has access alongside the other members of the family (RO07), to owning a lot of devices, some even twice, and both functional (RO08). Beyond the issue of owning or not a technological device, the domestication theory (Haddon, 2006; Silverston & Haddon, 1996) shows how important the stories behind the devices really are – the narratives of the acquisition, of the functionality, of the way the technology was appropriated by the kid through the use of stickers or other ‘personal marks’, of the place the device occupies in the child’s and family life, etc. These vary from a child to another, and with a series of factors, ranging from the financial ones to the parenting type, the usage degree, the digital literacy of the parents, the social pressures, etc. Table 2 offers a synthetic image of the Romanian sample situation regarding the technological ownership and usage by children; some more special aspects will be detailed later. T ABLE 2: T HE DEVICES OWNED BY CHILDREN OR TO WHICH THEY HAVE ACCESS Famil The child y owns a numb smart-phone er The child has The child access to a owns a family member’s tablet smartphone RO01 No RO02 Kind of* RO03 No Yes, the father’s Yes, the mother’s Yes, the mother’s RO04 No Yes, the brother’s RO05 Yes Yes, the mother’s Yes RO06 No No Yes, a second one No No RO07 RO08 No Yes, the father’s Yes, the father’s and mother’s Yes, to every members of the family’s smartphone (sometimes even visitor’s) Yes, a second one No Yes The child has access to a family member’s tablet No No No Yes (second one) No No Not currently, there used to be one Yes, the brother’s No The child has or had access to a laptop or desktop computer Hardly, at her mother’s desktop Yes Yes (family laptop) Yes (family desktop computer) Yes (family laptop) Yes, the mother’s or father’s Yes,the family’s desktop computer Yes, the family’s desktop computer, currently broken (she’s waiting for a new laptop) Other mobile digital devices (which) No Other fixe digital devices (which) Educative laptop No Dvd-player Educative laptop No PSP, DVDplayer (mobile) No Playstation, wii, DVD-player Wii No No Educational laptop and education tablet DVD player Dvd-player Dvd-player 39 | 09 February 2016 RO09 Yes, currently used by the mother Yes, at his own Yes, two and phone, functional currently used tablets by the mother No No, he used to Two PSPs have access at the family desktop computer, now broken Yes, family’s No laptop computer Smart TV, DVD-player, home cinema system, Play Station Dvd-player RO10 Yes**, a No The two No broken one, brothers are but with about to internet receive their connection; first tablets it is shared (which are with his already brother bought) RO11 No Not currently, Yes Yes, to her Yes, to the No Dvd-player she used to sister’s family’s desktop have access to computer and sister’s family’s laptop smartphone * The grandmother, who was present at the interview of the girl kept saying that she has an old smartphone which, in fact does not have a charger, nor an internet connection or a SIM card inside. Practically, it was all but useless (except for the camera). **It is probably more accurate to consider this smartphone a ‘little-obsolete tablet’, as it doesn’t have any SIM card in it and has very poor capabilities. But as slow as someone could imagine, the smartphone was still functional, when connected to the internet. As other studies have shown (Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2014, Velicu et al., 2014), the device which is still most commonly encountered in the Romanian household is the computer (be it a desktop or a laptop). Thus, only in two families the computer was broken, so the child no longer has access to it (RO08 and RO09), and only in one (RO08) the decision of replacing the old one with another one was already taken. Family RO09 is the only one in which we witness the total obsolescence of the computer age and the entering in a new, post-computer age (replacing the computer with the tablet, the smart phone, the smart TV). Yet, if given an alternative, the kids prefer to migrate on mobile devices, with the tablet as the most used and present gadget, seen by the children as more accessible, in terms of the competences required, as well as in terms of mobility (as the laptop is used as a fixed device, well anchored on a desk, and not a mobile device). Those that use the tablet in parallel with the computer do it in order to play certain games (RO11) which they only play on the computer; sometimes, it’s games they play with their parents, and as such, the motivation it’s a family activity, and not the game itself (RO05): ‘Researcher: You said you play on the computer rarely. What does that mean, rarely? RO11g6: Meaning not playing all the time. Rarely. Researcher: So that’s once a day, once a week? RO11m37: No, she enters very rarely. May be once a month; the last month I don’t even know if she accessed it. It’s only when she misses the games she has got there. She’s got certain CDs she installs, with games she doesn’t find anywhere else. For instance, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, some creative games. Researcher: What does that mean, creative games? What does she have to do? 40 | 09 February 2016 RO11m37: To color in, to guess things.’ (RO11) ‘The laptop not so much; they rarely use the laptop. RO05b3, not at all. RO05b7 still plays chess or that Viking game (The lost Vikings, game that RO05b7 plays with his father - nAV&MM), now they have a train simulator and play – you have to build tracks – and play with their father as well.’ (RO05m35) Another rare, if not singular situation for the Romanian sample is the case where the child has very advanced digital skills and he prefers to combine and mix technologies, being able to recognize their specific capabilities and to use them as efficiently: ‘Researcher: Which is the one technology you like most? RO06b8: The best of the best? I couldn’t name it. Can I name three of them, for instance? Or at least two? Here, two of them: the laptop and the tablet. Researcher: Yeah? In this order? RO06b8: Yeah, for me, yeah. I agree, it’s not as portable as the tablet, but, apart from that, it can and it does a lot more, in some cases. That depends on what you want. (RO06b8)’ Of all the other digital technologies, the DVD player is most frequent; only three families do not own one, either because they consider it obsolete, when compared to the large array of options of films online (when the DVD player broke, RO06 threw it away, considering a new one wouldn’t be necessary and RO07 never got one), or they cannot afford or want one (RO04, a nonselective family, watching the films on TV). The PSP, the Play Station or the Wii are less present in Romania (see also Livingstone et al., 2011, Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2014, Velicu et al., 2014), and thus, rarely encountered in our sample – they are to be founded either in families with relatives abroad, those relatives with some influence in diffusing such a gadget (RO09), or in families with a high social status, where the parents are advanced users (both by the time of use and by the competence criteria) and even gamers themselves (such as RO05 and RO06). Nevertheless, the most encountered device, accompanying the life of children (with one exception, RO07) is the TV set, present in each household, many times during the interview being left open on a cartoon channel or another. Ranging from having one TV set in each room (four devices, at RO11), to that where they cannot afford a second device, which they want (RO04), the TV set accompanies the children in their daily routine, from dawn, before going to school – RO01g6 or RO05b7 admit, laughingly, that they have their breakfast in front of the TV – and sometimes even in the evening, when they watch their favorite TV show (RO08 and RO11) to bed time. Not only the time of day differs, the type of viewing is also important: in the morning, the medium in itself is important (McLuhan, 1969), while in the evening, viewing the favorite TV show enters the logic of fandom participatory culture (Jenkins, 1992), RO08g6 or RO11g6 religiously watch Violetta, and surround themselves with branded object. 3.1.2. Activities and applications The most frequent activities kids engage in when using digital technologies are: gaming, watching video and audio content and creating content (pictures, video). Rarely they 41 | 09 February 2016 communicate through it or search information online. When they also have a mobile device and an internet connection, searching, downloading and deleting apps on the device becomes an activity in itself. 3.1.2.1. Video games Video games seem to be the activity shared by all the children five to eight, when it comes to digital technologies. The only boy in our sample (RO07b6) who stated loud and clear, twice during the interview, that he’s not interested in video games, plays such games when with other children, as a socialization means or, as the father puts it, ‘for competition’s sake.’ Despite this consistency across the sample, the types of games they play, the rationales, the time dedicated or the interest manifested, the perception on the games itself or the competences required to play it differ from one child to the other. Thus, when played on the computer, games are usually accessed in the browser, each time they Google search to get there, with quite general search words (e.g. ‘cooking games,’ ‘car games,’ etc.). RO02g7 and RO06b8 display a different pattern, as the have their own favorite websites whose name they type in the address bar, websites they’re familiar with after being introduced to them by a friend (RO02g7) or by their father (RO06b8). Rarely they play games which are installed on the computer – such as Minecraft (RO06b8) or The Lost Vikings (RO06b7) – or even played directly from CDs (RO03g7 and RO11g6). On the tablets, preferred and omnipresent are, in general, the escape and obstacles type of games (Temple Run, Sub Surfer etc.) and nurture and mimic type (Talking Angela and Talking Tom were present, at one moment or the other, on the devices of all the children). To these, seen rather as neutral and universal, are added those stereotyped as ‘girlie games’ (cooking, style, creation, ‘princess games’ – such as Barbie or Star-Girl) or ‘boys’ games’ (fights, cars, football – GTA, FIFA). Many times, the games requiring higher competences and at least minimal strategy approach (such as Angry Birds) are seen as difficult by the inexperienced players and, as such, deleted from the tablet. Minecraft occupies a special place, as kids who are on very different levels as users of digital technologies are equally fascinated by it. ‘A game which is extraordinarily common amazed me. Minecraft, the famous Minecraft, yes, the famous, with a graphics that, if you would have tried selling, ten years ago, everybody would have laughed and nobody would have cared to notice it. It looks as if we were at the beginning of computing, yeah, the graphics’ about that old – but kids play it like crazy.’ (RO06f47) Just as a good novel, Minecraft allows for users with different types of approach (builders, conquerors) and various involvement levels, and as such, is fit enough to be played by a little girl with minor digital competences, assisted by her brother at each step she makes on the Internet (RO04g6), as well as by a boy (RO06b8), strongly anchored in the Minecraft culture, who watches YouTube tutorials on how to build various stuff with the help of ‘codes’, and who wants to make his own tutorials to be uploaded on his own YouTube channel (he has already got it); who has also got a Facebook account created especially in order to actively participate to the Minecraft Romania Facebook group. 42 | 09 February 2016 3.1.2.2. Watching video Beyond and besides gaming, kids watch online various videos. From the classical cartoons (usually, Disney adaptations) which they sometimes watch online unendingly (RO02g7, RO03g7 or RO05b3), to other cartoons, hard to get by otherwise, such as Misha and Masha, the RO07 boys use to watch, YouTube seems to offer all the kids their favorite cartoons. Yet, with the age and with the opening up of their interests, kids start to search for other types of video recordings; thus, YouTube is taken out of the paradigm ‘extension or alternative to the cartoon channels on TV’ and using it within the ‘User Generated Content’ paradigm, the Web 2.0. Thus, RO03g7 watches online vlogs on how to make various arts & crafts she then tries to re-create or watches various vlogs of intelligent toys interacting with each other; RO07b6 and RO07b3 watch Lego building videos; RO06b8 and RO09b6 watch various tutorials or whole vlogs (they subscribed to) on how to play Minecraft, while RO08g6 watches cooking videos for various cakes and sweets, alongside with her mother. This type of internet use is on the verge, between informational – some of them being obviously oriented by their desire to learn how to make different things (RO06b8 explains in detail how he ‘takes notes’ making screen captures of various hard to memorize codes he wants to then use in his own buildings and tutorials) – and entertainment. Mutatis mutandis, we can even talk about some form of vicarious living, as it is encountered in the escapist theory of media use (Blumler & McQuail, 1968), when we look at the smart-toys vlogs RO03g7 watches. Exposure of children to advertising and even the ads’ use seem to have gotten a new form when we talk about younger kids and their digital engagement. Thus, in many cases, some of the kids are intently searching, under their parents approving eyes or with their help (when the kid doesn’t read/write), promotional videos for various products (e.g. Kinder Surprise). Although they know that is advertising, they enjoy it and even react to it in the expected direction – themselves and the parents. Repeatedly and intensively exposed to advertising, these children and their parents tend to consider the acquisition of those products as ‘normal’: ‘RO11g6: I usually watch for what’s new at Kinder. At the toy babies videos. Researcher: Let me see, where are you looking for them? RO11g6: On YouTube. I type kinder here and it gives me. Researcher: Ok... I see. And after you see these videos you start pestering your mom to buy you kinder eggs? RO11g6: (laughing). No, usually, when we go shopping it’s only normal (emphasizes) to buy me a kinder egg (the parents laugh themselves). (RO11g6)’ ‘RO08m26: Yes, she watches Violetta ads, those… Violetta surprise eggs. She sees them on YouTube. You don’t know them? You only have to write ‘Kinder eggs with Violetta”. And there are videos where they show plastic eggs one opens and shows the toy inside. (...) Researcher: Is she tempted by the things she sees in the ads on the tablet? RO08m26: Yes, she keeps on telling me: mom, that doll or that toy, I want. And she’s pestering her father until he buys it to her. Yes, it’s happening. Now she’s seen a charmed mirror that turns her into a princess and she wants one too. I told her: “my, you really believe what they say? That will transform you into a princess?” It only shows a girl turning around, in a princess dress. They only put on the market various stuff to tempt children and make their parents buy them. Yes, she always wants them.’ (RO08m26) 43 | 09 February 2016 Last but not least, children use to watch official demo videos for the games they want to download and install on their mobile devices. Created partially for marketing purposes (to make as many users download them) and partially for information-educational purposes (as they also show how you’re supposed to play them), these videos are surprisingly used by children in the logic of window shopping. Thus, with no intention of downloading new apps, sometimes kids ‘navigate’, from link to link inside the magazine play/app store, stopping from time to time to admire a product, via its promotional video, and then going on to another. RO05b7 and RO10b6 started spontaneously to use the tablet in this way during the interview, while they were having their tablet or smart phone in their hand when talking to the researcher. 3.1.2.3. Content creation All the children in the Romanian sample know how and love to take pictures and videos with the help of the devices they own or have access to. Some of them have dedicated devices (RO01g6 and RO03g7) for that, others do it with the help of their parents’ smart phones (RO07b6) or even with other types of mobile phones with a camera (RO04g6). For most of them, these recordings have no other purpose than preserving (sometimes, for a short while, as they soon deleted them from the otherwise limited memory of the device) some moments of their lives that they consider important and sharing them with their families and friends: RO09b6 tells us about the pictures he took on his birthday, RO03g7 about those she took while on a trip to the Zoo with her class, while RO02g7 used to photograph flowers: ‘RO02m27: She likes to be photographed and to take pictures of things as well. Many times she did photograph the flowers; the blossom was small and in a few days time she took a picture and told me: “Look, mom, it blossomed; it was small and look at it now.” (RO02m27)’ But there are cases where the message of these pictures is intended from the onset to go beyond the family circle as are aimed towards a wider audience. Two such situations stood out: 1. sending photos to a community of interest (e.g. the cyclist or the Minecraft players’ community) to get an information or an informed evaluation and 2. sending out photos without a precise purpose or target, with the only intention of showing them to the world. In the first case, the parent has an important role, be it while creating and distributing the content (RO07), or through an active mediation, a more general, but ongoing type of mediation, through which the child is explained what he or she could make public, how to do it, etc. (RO06). ‘RO07f38: Today of all days I made him take pictures of his bike. He wanted a speed bike and we bought a second hand one and we’re gonna fix it. And then I made him take pictures with my phone and we’re gonna upload them on Facebook, to the cyclist community, to give us advice on parts, what to replace.’ (RO07f38) The second situation, which happened on the backdrop of a permissive parental mediation (RO08), is when the child takes initiative and, through mimetic behavior, posts 44 | 09 February 2016 uncritically on her mother’s Facebook account various pictures she took (some of them, with herself and friends on the street, which can be seen as a risky activity). The mother does not seem bothered in any way by the child’s activity of her child that she sees as a proof of her digital competence: ‘RO08m26: Say, what else do you know how to do? On Facebook, how comes you know how to enter and like things and post pictures without me knowing?... RO08g6: Yeah. Researcher: On your wall, I suppose. RO08m26: Yeah, yeah. I did not make her one for herself. Researcher: But is she aware she does post them or isn’t she? RO08m26: Oh, no, she’s aware, how could she not be. She comes and tells me, ‘look, mom, what was I posting’. Look at her what she’s doing! Researcher: But is she allowed? Or do you forbid her doing so? RO08m26: No, I allow her. I let her play. But I tell her, Felicia, since you’ve got the tablet, go use yours, since my battery runs out quickly. You only go on it for a short wwhile and that’s it, it’s gone. (RO08)’ Not least the internet and Facebook work as an exhibit space for creations from the real world (complicated Lego constructions, RO07) or from the virtual world (Minecraft, RO06). Many children (RO01g6, RO07b6, RO04g6 etc.) use, especially upon their parents’ suggestion, computer apps for drawings and painting and learn how to save their own creations they’re so proud of (their parents, as well). Surprisingly, when they change device and move on to the tablet, some kids lose the interest in such games, while others get discouraged by the parents. Thus, RO01g6 used to draw and edit pictures while using her mom’s desktop computer, under her mother’s direct supervision, but gave up totally such activities when moving on to the tablet and when the maternal mediation got reduced to a minimum (yet, the child continues drawing extensively in her ‘real’ life and even ‘make’ and write small books). The explanation of such a resignation can be found somewhere in between two contradictory feelings animating children at that age: on one hand, the need for freedom in choosing their own apps and content they use and, on the other, the need to be guided, accompanied, and appreciated by an adult, in all their digital activities (RO01g6 expressed many times during the interview the desire of being mediated more by the mother, in the digital world). Although Paint and other such apps are preferred by the parents – who see them as educational, creative activities – there are some parents with a more critical approach when it comes to drawing on the tablet; they consider that the easiness of access and readiness to draw, the elements which most attract children, could turn into a trap in acquiring other deeper competences. Thus, in the case of RO06b8, the father opposed to translating this type of activity from the computer to the tablet, considering the boy would not learn anything from it: ‘Yes, he drew a lot, especially on the computer, in the classical Paint software. He loved to having been able to do so, again, since it’s so comfortable to use. What he obviously liked a lot was that he only needed a few clicks to change the color or delete or correct something; it’s much easier than with your own hand, right? (...) He no longer has it on the tablet. On the other tablet he’d installed a drawing app, for drawing different things. But I told him, RO06b8, I’d rather have you draw with your hand, not with your finger! I mean I’d rather you learned holding a pencil, a brush, as this is not ok. I 45 | 09 February 2016 almost accepted the mouse, but drawing with your finger, you’d be teaching yourself a bad way, because later on you will not use your finger, but a brush or a pencil.’ (RO06f47) 3.1.2.4. Communication Some of the children in the Romanian sample use the digital technology in order to engage in communication. For this, they use Skype and the Facebook messenger – some of them, as independent users, some, assisted by adults. The frequency of use also differs, as well as the person(s) they contact this way: the patterns of use are a combination between the specific situation the child has to confront with (a parent away from home for a longer or shorter period of time) and a model of socialization and of digital media use, a model the child picks up via family and friends. For the first case, RO02g7 is the best example, but not the only one. All along 2015, RO02m27 was away, on and off, in Germany, for a vocational training and, as single (divorced) mother, she left her child in the grandmother’s care. Yet, during the away periods, she kept in touch with the child via Skype (she made a special account for her daughter it connects automatically on the laptop at home and where only the mother’s a contact) and Facebook: ‘RO02m27: Yes, I have a Skype account logged on the phone. I use it ‘cause, as I am always away, I talk to her over the Skype and I’ve got the phone, she’s got the laptop at home. Researcher: Right, so, besides gaming and the YouTube, she uses Skype by herself? RO02m27: Yeah, yeah! She uses it herself, no help, yeah. Or, many times, on Facebook, she writes me, leaves me a message… but rarely, on Facebook, because the account I am permanently logged in on the phone is the same as the one at home. Researcher: Um, and you cannot have the same account logged in on two devices. RO02m27: Right, she cannot leave me a message (from the same account, nAV), but we talk over Skype. At home there’s another password, on the computer and on the phone I have my own account. Well, when she comes back from school she calls me, to tell me she’s home, she’s ok, what did she do, how things went, if she got a grade and then, in the evening, after work, non stop. (...) Many times she’s bored: ‘Ok, mom, I’m back from school, kisses, bye.’ And if I see she’s not calling, I beep her right away. ‘I started doing my homework and I will call you afterwards.’ But especially in the evening, each evening we talk via Skype. (RO02m27)’ If for talking they choose the Skype, in order to share with her daughter the Germany experience the mother chooses to post on Facebook, especially for the girl, various photos taken in the places she went; she then tells the daughter to log in her Facebook account, since the password was memorized by the computer, yet the child would only log in when the mother tells her so, so that she gets to see the pictures. Also, adult initiated Skype calls happen in other families when an adult family member is away for a longer or a shorter period of time: in RO07, when the father goes for a few days to a conference abroad or in RO09, when the uncle spent a few years in the US, each time the 46 | 09 February 2016 family kept in touch via Skype, with the adult (the departed one or the one at home) initiating the call. A similar pattern as RO02g7 is the RO06b8 who, having his own Facebook account, kept in touch via messenger with the father at home, while the child and his mother went visiting some relatives in Italy: ‘RO06f47: When he went in Italy I wasn’t with him, I carried on here with my stuff, but kept in touch via the tablet. They had a wifi (in Italy) and obviously he kept on calling me, well, my facebook messenger, he called and we talked a lot. I mean, we really talked a lot during those three weeks he was away. (RO06f47)’ Just as RO02g7, RO06b8 adapts his use of various applications to his purpose, in order to make communication most efficient. Thus, when he needed to send a larger file to one of his friends (living nearby, a few blocks away), he created a Skype account he never used afterwards with his father, as he knew the father was always available on Facebook. Besides this type of communication – long distance, with the family (mostly abroad), where the Internet connection gets to be uses especially because it’s free (to the extent there is such a connection) and also allows for visual contact – some of the kids engage, starting from their mothers’ accounts, in chats with people nearby, such as aunts, godparents, friends and peers and even with the school mistress (RO03g7, RO05b7, RO08g6, RO10b5). This type of communication differs from the one described above – as here, what is important is the medium or the app per se, in a McLuhanian paradigm. 3.2. How are new (online) technologies perceived by the different family members? 3.2.1. The perception of the devices 3.2.1.1. The smartphone, a yet not necessary device Despite the fact that almost all the kids in the study want to have a phone of their own, most of the Romanian parents consider this as being still unnecessary, given the age of the children and their relatively low independence (as they are brought to and fro school by their parents, they play nearby the house or are constantly supervised or accompanied by them). Only two of the children have their own functional mobile phone, but neither of them uses them in their daily lives – partially because they also have their own tablet they use to play on. As noticed in other studies (Haddon & Vincent, 2014), at a young age, the phone is seen as an extension of the umbilical chord through which parents stay in touch with the child, when they’re not around. Thus, RO05m35 describes the complicated decision making process for buying a phone for RO05b7: ‘Around six or I don’t know exactly when, while we were in the car: ‘Mom, I will soon turn seven, will I get a phone?’, and mommy’s answer was, ‘No, absolutely not.’ Then he took us separately. He took daddy separately: ‘Dad, 47 | 09 February 2016 when I’ll turn seven...?’ and dad said, ‘No, it’s out of the question!’ Then he took it to his aunt, and the same, she said no. That, until we experienced the first field trip we did not know anything about him from morning ‘til dusk; and it was also his school mistress’ first field trip with them and she wanted to see who is she dealing with, parents-wise, who’s a control freak and cannot stay out of touch with their own children. And then we said it’s strictly to this avail, and wrote Santa and then Santa brought the phone, with a note, I told you, where it said it’s only for field trips and camps’ (RO05m35) On the other hand, in a family where the buying decision follows a totally different pattern (RO09) and where giving a child whatever he/she wants is the norm, regardless of age, the boy’s smart phone entered the family sort of unacknowledged, adding up to other technological devices, sometimes doubling them – and just as unnoticed got to be used by the mother, when her own phone broke. The rationale was the same – the boy didn’t really need the phone, as he was always around his mother. If, when the child has a larger range of action and earns a degree of independence, the presence of smart phone gives the parents a feeling of security and permanent contact with the kid, when the child is in close contact and within the parent’s surveillance range, the presence of the smart phone paradoxically turns out to be considered as an element of insecurity, leaving the child exposed to possible mugging. Also, school regulations forbidding the use of mobile phones in school are used by parents as an argument in delaying the buying decision. Some kids, especially those encouraged by the family to adopt a more critical stance and argue their own options or desires, get to agree with their parents arguments, internalizing them and reproducing them in discourse as their own arguments. Thus, when asked if he wanted a mobile phone, RO06b8 answers: ‘RO06b8: Not necessarily. Because I know anyway that it’s better I don’t get one, for the time being.’ The interview with the father shows how he got to this awareness of the current lack of utility of a smart phone: ‘RO06f47: At a certain point he asked the question, as he has seen that all the other children have one. (...) And I told him, ‘you go out and fuss around, play – that’s the last thing you needed, to worry about the phone in your pocket. Really now, are you sure you want this?’ And he says, No. I mean, we are all here, you can find us; we bump into each other. Do you really need a phone?, I told him, worrying that he might become a target for someone who would want to take it from him.’ (RO06f47) 3.2.1.2. The tablet – an extra toy Both these attitudes – the parents’ rationale and the openness of the child to give credit to the parent’s motive – are somewhat singular, as the desire of owning a certain technology in itself, in an endless accumulation of devices into some panoply of the toys the child already has, already represents the most encountered situation. ‘Yes, I want this, I want that too!’ is, actually, a recurrent phrase in children’s discourse when a 48 | 09 February 2016 new device they don’t own yet is brought up in discussion by the researcher, during the cards game. Partly due to their lack of knowledge – as they don’t grasp the difference between the IOS and the Android –, and partly to the fact that, for them, the digital technology is essentially the object in its physical, visible form, when the children in the sample are about to describe some of the devices, most of them don’t use intrinsic technological specs; they either describe them visually, or specify the owner. Thus, they say the white or black phone, the small or big tablet (when there are two such devices in the family) or mother’s phone/father’s phone. Just as the ideal tablet should look pretty, have a ‘Hello Kitty, a Violetta and some glitter,’ says RO08g6 - although, according to her mother, the little girl often complains that the battery doesn’t last for too long or that the tablet is too slow. This approach of and relationship to the technological devices is taken over from their own parents, as some of the parents find it difficult to grasp the difference between the operating systems. For instance, when asked whether her phone’s running on Android or IOS/Apple, RO08m26 answered Android, although later on it was revealed she has an iPhone 4,with the IOS on. Moreover, the fact that RO08g6’s first tablet was an iPad was revealed by mistake, when RO08m26 saw the researcher’s tablet, which was also an iPad and said that her daughter’s first tablet was a similar one. Until that moment she only referred to it strictly in relationship to its costs, considering it excessively expensive to be used by a child who is also careless towards her own stuff, as the mother described her. Despite the fact she doesn’t know the technical capabilities of the various devices, to help guide family RO08 in their acquisitions and despite the fact the girl faces some difficulties in using IOS (since she does not know how to download apps from the AppStore and even reproaches her mother she doesn’t like to play on her phone because there’s no Magazine Play on it), the brand’s appeal overcomes these obstacles and the girl declares confidently under her mother’s amused eye that she wants an iPhone (last year she wanted an iPhone 5, now it’s a 6). Actually, appreciating or evaluating technologies exclusively in terms of the relative costs of the devices is frequent in the Romanian sample (especially among parents), acquisition being placed under the rule, ‘the cheaper, the better’: ‘RO03f41: We just said, Ok, if I can’t fix that one, I mean, if it costs me more to fix it, let’s buy a new one. It’s not much, it’s an average one, an Utok. It cost 200 lei, and it can perform up to what she needs, so I don’t know whether something else would be worthed. You don’t buy a Samsung or I don’t know what else, and invest a lot of money in it.’ (RO03f41) ‘Researcher: And the acquisition what considerations guided it - the technical aspects? The price? Their desires? RO10m39: No, we negotiated nothing. We found them on sale and bought two of them.’ (RO10m39) Still, the tendency of buying one’s child the most expensive item of digital technology, regardless any technological consideration, is common among parents with low digital literacy, and little formal education, in an attempt of giving the child ‘the best’ chances in life. 49 | 09 February 2016 Among the children, only RO05b7 and RO06b8 could name their tablet brand, while RO06b8 can also appreciate the technical characteristics of it: ‘Researcher: What’s your current tablet? RO06b8: Still an Utok, only newer and with a better processor. It’s an inch smaller. But I got used to it. Researcher: And the battery? RO06b8: So, my former tablet, the battery was really good. For any game. It used to last a lot. At this one, I once played a game while in the car; a game using a lot of battery, but at my previous tablet it lasted. And now, in five minute it was over! From 50%. The game was requiring a lot of resources, but the previous one would have gotten depleted in 20 minutes.’ (RO06b8) 3.2.1.3. Technology? I mean, the device Both the parents and the children in the Romanian sample tend to appreciate as technology and consider worthy to invest their money solely in the devices, the physical objects; content and software are only seen as collateral elements you take ‘for free’ from the internet and, if nothing else, you just do without them, as was the case of RO04: RO04b10 had received a tablet to which her sister also had access (RO04g6), but couldn’t download any app on it, as they didn’t had an wi-fi connection. Thus, the thumb rule almost everyone seems to observe is ‘no paid apps’! To most of them, the App Store or the Magazine Google Play had no credit/debit card attached to it. This reluctance in buying apps for money is even more surprising as it occurs in families willing to invest considerable sums of money in the digital devices themselves, such as RO09. Although they declared a very low household income during the interview, RO09 is perhaps the most technologically endowed family in the Romanian sample. Still, the ‘no paid apps’ rule was so strongly embedded in their family culture, that they preferred to invest in a second device which would have allowed them to access more free apps than to pay for the apps: ‘Researcher: But how comes you have two tablets, and both functional? What’s the story behind it? RO09m29: One… We got our first, the big one, the iPad, he got it for his birthday from my brother who was in America back then. And the second one we bought it to him when we moved in here. Researcher: But how did you got to think he needed another one? RO09m29: Well, with the big one we couldn’t take games down. I mean, we rarely find any. And we said, let’s get a tablet with which he could take the games down quicker. So he could play.’ (RO09m29) Only two families among those owning a mobile device the child has access to, are willing to pay for the apps, but only when the child really wants a certain app or option in an app whih is not available for free. Thus, the option of buying an app in order to protect the child against the embedded advertising is rejected by both families; they consider that kids have enough digital literacy as to know what to do when they encounter the ads: ‘RO05m35: And I taught them or they’ve seen me when I was playing – when those little ads appear, they are not to click on them – or if a video pops up or 50 | 09 February 2016 something, they should hit the X. It’s those free games full of ads; you should press the X, so RO05b3 just learnt how to close them, seeing me do it. Researcher: And you contemplate buying, at one time or another, the games, in order to get rid of the ads or they don’t bother you that much... RO05m35: We didn’t get to that yet. I’d rather pay if he really wants a particular game. Not for the ads.’ (RO05m35) This perception parents have regarding the online content (including the apps downloaded) which has to be free is only in a couple of cases the result of an idealistic view of the internet – as the tool ensuring democratic access to information via open data – or the view according to which the internet grows with the help of user generated content –RO06f47 and RO07f38 share this view, although they both understand pretty well the commercial side and functioning of some portion of the internet. On the contrary, most of the adults in the sample see the internet in an analogy with cable TV, where you only pay for the connection and have access to all the content ‘flowing’ there. This is also because most of the parents and their children see digital technologies as ‘entertainment,’ as playful activities. Even if some of the parents (a few) do recognize the educational value of some of the games, they don’t seem to have, for the moment, the availability in actively involving and guiding the child on this alternative route: ‘RO01m45: Most of the things she’s got installed on it are stupid little things. Not helping her a bit. I mean, it’s one thing to develop an ability or something. To get to find your way within a labyrinth, even if most of them are easy ones, but at least she learns something. But sitting and matching three colored marbles together is not ok. So for the moment I don’t think the influence is necessarily a good one. But in the future I may change my mind, since I know there will be digital handbooks and so on – to which the tablet might prove useful and that might tilt the balance. Researcher: Do you think your parenting style will be helped by the tablet? RO01m45: Certainly. Certainly. Sure there are many software and apps which would help, it’s just that we don’t access them yet. (RO01m45)’ On the children’s devices it’s only too seldom that openly educational apps show up, usually, at the parents’ initiative – but, if the child gets to know how to delete his or her own games, most likely these apps would vanish (as it happened to RO08: the girl quickly deleted the math app her mother had downloaded, but displayed a momentary interest in it during the interview and asked her mother to install it again). That does not mean that (at least from the parents’ part) the opportunities brought by digital technologies are not acknowledged. Many times they mention the informative aspect of them, the fact that they ensure an easier access to information and some sense of readability – and sometimes they mention the educational aspect of by certain apps or websites. But, from the discourse of the Romanian parents interviewed, none of these are available for 6 to 8 y.o. children, which are seen as either too small for the information/educational opportunities the internet offers, as these children don’t know how to read yet, or as too old for the educational apps which, children and parents as well, consider as too boring (‘obsolete’ as RO11m37 calls them) and too easy for them. 51 | 09 February 2016 3.2.2. Positive perception on the digital technologies: the opportunities 3.2.2.1. The influence over the literacy The toy laptops and tablets with educational apps on them are bought by the parents in the hope these will help the child how to read, write, count, etc. But in talks with children, most of them see these also as boring; thus, these devices are relatively rarely used, although many children in the sample have had one or more. One little girl (RO02g7) said she did learn to read on such a toy laptop – which was, at the moment of the interview, functional, with the batteries charged and available; that is unusual, as this sort of devices usually are discarded, ‘somewhere’ in the house, after a few weeks or, at best, months after acquisition (broken or at least with batteries discharged). Two of the parents admit the influence of the educational apps or websites over their children’ learning of English, and implicitly regret the lack of interesting educational content available in Romanian: ‘RO05m35: They’re good, I don’t know, it makes them open to the world. At least Vlad (RO05b7) had a period when he only had educational games on his tablet, numbers, letters, colors, puzzles – things I’ve downloaded for him. And he was really into them. He was attending an English intensive kindergarten and that somewhat helped. Or at least I like to think it helped (he laughs)’. (RO05m35) ‘Researcher: I observed that although he only just started school, Tudor can read. Did the computer have any influence, were there any educational computer games? RO07f38: Yes, it did. It did. There’s a website, starfall.com, he learnt about when his grandpa has been to visit his US grandkids. There are a lot of games for each letter. He first learnt the alphabet in English and only then in Romanian. At one point that was preventing him from reading, actually. Since he was used to read each letter in English.’ (RO07f38) Other parents wanted to be a step ahead school and teach children letters and reading, but they did so with the help of the ‘old’ media (books), the idea that they could be searching online for educational websites or apps being alien to them (RO10m39 or RO11m37 are such examples). Besides, even when the internet is seen as an information source, it is mostly viewed as a sort of a digital extension of the classical library, at any moment readily available to the children. ‘RO11m37: Yes, they’re good. They could learn, I mean, they find…, they are available. Elena (RO11g11) uses only for school purposes. Very rarely, I told you, for music or something else. The DEX (The Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language – n. AV&MM) is online; English translations – again, she uses the internet. It’s something quite necessary, as I tell Elena (RO11g11), since it helps you out for a home work or a reading, you can make an abstract, you don’t have to spend time searching through books or you don’t have to buy… so it’s something useful, available. And it helps a lot for synonyms, 52 | 09 February 2016 antonyms – you don’t have to waste your time searching through the many pages of a dictionary.’ (RO11m37)1 Thus, all the interviewed parents recognize and admit the educational opportunities offered by the technology, but two different strands can be found here: on one hand, there are those who consider the educational technologies as a tool to be only used in school, a view held by parents with a low socio-economical status; they only credit school as the only agency responsible for the child’s formation; they use the technologies less, and only for their own entertainment (RO02, RO04, RO08, RO09, RO10, RO11). Without denying these opportunities, the parents with a higher socio-economical status, who are also more experienced internet users, with a wider range of online or digital activities (RO06, RO07, RO05, RO01), have a broader view over the internet’s educational opportunities and those stemming from the digital technologies in general, which can be used for various hobbies (learning how to play an instrument, the moves of a sport), learning a foreign language, strategic thinking, etc. Moreover, for the first group of parents, the educational and playfulness side of the internet are strictly separated: the first is related to the writing and can be seen as a digital translation of the knowledge found in books; while, in the second one, the video content and the games are prevailing. This perception is then passed on to the children, as the tablet-in-school gets to be used as an opportunity to play on the tablet during the breaks or, quite contrary, totally reject the ‘learning through play,’ as ‘that’s not learning’. 3.2.2.2. Technologies, a parenting help Beyond being educational, technologies are a help for parents when they give them a time out, while capturing the kids’ attention, at home and especially on the road or in public places. Although most of the parents use technology as a baby sitter when at home (e.g. RO01, RO05), only a few of them are aware of this; others see it as only natural (RO09, RO08, RO02): ‘RO01m45: I may have used it as a baby sitter at home, I mean, I said, come on, shut it down, you were too long on it, because I enjoyed the silence.’ (RO01m45) ‘RO05m35: I use it (this way). (...) Mommy needs to relax and not have someone screaming around her.’ (RO05m35) ‘RO09m29: But no, he (RO09b6) sits here, all by himself, I keep myself busy in the kitchen or with Rada (RO09g1). He gets to sit here, watching Minecraft, puts on a cartoon or something and watches it, sometimes – not very often.’ (RO09m29) Yet, if the family owns a mobile device, then parents use it on purpose, while travelling for longer or shorter trips, aware of the devices ability of using ‘dead’ time which transportation brings along. 1 The researchers had tried to keep the respondents’ disourse particularities (e.g. the impersonal phrasing, the ellipses they used to refer to actions which they feel like not attributing to themselves or not mentioning onto whom they perform it, i.e., their child) in translating the quotes. 53 | 09 February 2016 ‘Ro01m45: If we go some place, where I know I have to wait for a while or we go for a long trip by car, then yes, I take the tablet with me.’ (Ro01m45) 3.2.2.3. The family united around technology Although some of the social/media panics emphasize the disturbing effect technology use have onto the family environment, at least in what concerns the children in the Romanian sample, this did not surface in the interviews. Quite contrary, in most of the cases the family reunites often times around technology, in various family activities. Thus, listening to music on the computer happens either at the parent’s initiative (RO07b38 or RO04m28), or at the child’s initiative, each time, within a different logic. For the parent, the focus is on music, while the child happens to be nearby, so the parent teaches the child some things about the music, in families with more educated parents and/or with a passion for music; otherwise, where there’s no musical education, it’s just enjoying together the musical moment in a family context. ‘RO07f38: They listen to it when I listen to it. I listen to music and they come here, listening to what I listen. Grandpa used to put on some kids’ music on trilulilu.ro, but they weren’t so excited about that. RO07b6 knows a lot of bands, he knows what we listen to, he knows that these are the guitars, this is the bass, he distinguishes the instruments – we watch this kind of things on YouTube.’ (RO07f38) But if listening to music happens at the child’s initiative, then that is more like a ‘together’ activity with the parent, while music is only being the pretext. In such situations, listening to music is no longer a static situation, as the kid is generally active and gets to engage the parent, too (or another adult in the room) to dance with him or her. ‘RO02g7: (excited) Yes, and we were listening to music and dancing, me and mom! I also used to dance with granny! RO02gm67. I made a fool out of myself (she laughs) and she keeps telling me, ‘Come on, granny, I will teach you how to dance!’’ (RO02) ‘RO01m45: I don’t like the idea of a video. I have this idea that the music is for listening, not for seeing – and she keeps begging me. I think, here, she’s frustrated I don’t let her. I am searching for music and in the evenings we dance around. Mostly her, but it happens to me too, sometimes.’ (RO01m45) Playing together in the family, with digital technologies involved, is another recurring activity that showed up during the interviews – either between siblings, or between parents and sons/daughters. The most common activity is that a player (child or parent) plays and the other (child or parent) sits near and participate through advice; usually, after a couple of games, the roles are changing. Another situation (RO02, RO05, RO06), especially when it comes to the virtual worlds’ games, is that the child and the parent play from the same account, becoming a team, giving each other advice and contributing, each in its own time, to the building of the respective ‘world’. The most elaborate collaboration strategy was narrated by RO06: 54 | 09 February 2016 ‘RO06f47: When he goes to bed he leaves the tablet to me, well, it’s the fault of this game, Sim City, which we play together. But he leaves the tablet to me precisely because he knows I’m going to take care of the city; he reports to me if we get to see each other before going to bed, he tells me: look, I did that, see if that’s done. See if you can do that, there’s that on the ’to do list…’ (RO06f47) ‘RO06b8: In the morning, the first thing I do is look – we have a city simulator game, SimCity. I take care of it, me and my father. I mean, it’s just the two of us. It’s sort of an online game, you can trade in it. You put one thing on sale and the others come, compare it, and see your city.’ (RO06b8) Perhaps due to the age differences of the children in the sample and due to the lack of appetite of Romanian children for multi-player games (Livingstone et al., 2011, Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2014), the situation in which brothers play against each other in a multiplayer game is rare (actually, singular, RO04) and was explained by the mother as a lack of others kids to play with, in the physical world (near by/in the neighborhood). In this case, the older brother gets to choose the game (‘a boys’ game’) and initiate his sister RO04g6 in playing (a game with controls on the keyboard, which can be difficult for those who are not familiarized with it, as it requires movement coordination). The situation where the multiplayer games is played by a parent and the child is more often encountered; in this case, the parent is a passionate and totally in. Thus, the parent does not make any compromise in order to let the child win. In such cases, the game is played from a dedicated device, in families where video games are important and where there is the necessary equipment: ‘RO09b6: We play a super-heroes game. RO09m29: (smiling) With fighting. Everyone for himself. Yes, we play against each other. Researcher: And where is this game? RO09m29: On the Play Station. Researcher: So who is winning? RO09m29: (Laughs) Mom does!!! RO09b6: Mom always wins.’ (RO09) ‘RO06f47: We play together for years, on the Wii, we play various games, tennis – at this, he has got a better score than I do. And then I was pissed off and struggled to keep the pace and so we’ve got even. I mean, really, that can’t be. We also played golf on the Wii, but, well, that’s a specialized game – it’s Tiger Woods, it’s golfing, alright, and he really struggles, there to keep the pace with me. But I tried to explain that golfing is also an age thing, the older one gets, the worse you move and the better you get at golf (she laughs).’ (RO06f47) What’s specific to family RO06 is that the decision of buying the Wii (with a very low penetration in Romania) is correlated to the perception that it would encourage exercise. Thus, RO06f47 explains how he was concerned, in buying it, not only with giving the boy a device to play on, but also, with playing together and making him ‘get off that couch’: 55 | 09 February 2016 ‘RO06f47: We’re spending our winters mainly indoors. But let’s do something. And so we try to move a little. That’s what we actually do: jump around, play all sorts of… His mother goes in and goes out of the room, she looks at us, shakes her head and says, ‘oh my, these kids…!’ But what’s the big deal?! We play, it’s ok. The other things, the Play Station or the Xbox, they have that sort of remote control and you can sit on the sofa, eat, get as big as China and then pretend to be the biggest football champion!’ (RO06f47) Yet, we must admit this rationale is singular in the Romanian sample, where the buying decision is usually taken ad hoc (RO05 bought the Wii for one of the mother’s colleagues and by mistake they ordered two devices, while on sale) or the result of the child’s pressure, as he child sees it at other kids or that of a social pressure to buy a certain item of technology. One may notice that, in general, parents see the digital technologies as opportunities and through the opportunities they help the child, the family or themselves as parents. Technologies offer entertainment and information to the children and are a central point for the family to gather around; sometimes they get involved in activities together (involving movement and physical exercise), or capture the child’s attention when the parent needs a time out. 3.2.3. Negative perceptions and risks Yet, there are some aspects of these digital technologies that make the parents worry. As other studies have shown (Haddon &Vincent, 2014, Smachel & Wright, 2014), often times, these worries and concerns are not specific to the digital technologies, but are translated from the older, to the newer media. Thus, the most frequent concerns of the Romanian parents in the sample are related to excessive use, inadequate content and health concerns the interaction with digital technologies might entail. But, with few exceptions, these concerns are seen either as future threats, or under control due to the fact the child internalizes the regulations and self-regulates his or her activities or as a possibility parents try hard to avoid, or, lastly, as a risk for ‘other’ families and ‘other’ children, not our own. Except for RO05 and RO08, all the other parents see excessive use as a possible problem, but not for the moment – due to the parental strategies of reducing the time of use, and also due to the fact that, if not offered alternatives, the little ones give up the technologies easily, especially to outdoor activities (as digital devices are often used as a bad weather garment one puts on once ‘the bad weather keeps us inside the house’, as RO11m37 says). ‘Researcher: Which are the negative aspects of the internet, or those that worry you the most? RO11m37: That they don’t have a childhood anymore. Well, it’s not my case, since I hold them tight. When the tablets appeared in the house, the kids did not disconnect for two weeks. So they were confiscated for one week, for two, until they came back to their regular schedule.’ (RO11m37) 56 | 09 February 2016 ‘RO10m39: They access the computer only while I am at home, and they ask me, ‘Mom, can I?’ ‘May I too?’ I didn’t let them use the computer much. I didn’t want them to stare incessantly, from the age of four, because later you can’t take them away. (...) They play and have no notion of the time, was it one hour, two hours, three?… It’s better for them to play in the street, with the children. That’s my thinking. There will come a day when I won’t be able to take them away from the computer, but until then…’ (RO10m39) The excessive digital technologies use is already present in families RO05 and RO09. Thus, they often get in conflict with the children in an attempt of reducing the time of use. It’s interesting that, if in general the tablet, the PSP and other digital devices are added up to the older screen-based media, and the parents are worried by the total screen time of the children, in one of the cases the old media became more accepted and got to be considered almost something ‘natural’ to do, as opposed to those new media. ‘Researcher: (…) Are you worried about anything particular, in what concerns the internet? RO09m29: I don’t particularly fancy the fact he spends so much time on the tablet, PSP or on the internet. I keep telling him: dear, let’s give these eyes a break, watch something else for a change. So we watch a cartoon, a movie. There are these animal programs, discovery or – we recently discovered another one, I don’t recall its name.’ (RO09m29) At this age, parents’ concern on the screen time is related to the negative health impact it is likely to have; it’s only at older ages they start to worry about the impact on the children’ school performance. Eye issues and, correlated, headaches are the problems mentioned the most by the parents and, sometimes, by the children who had internalized the adults’ discourse: ‘Researcher: What do you think about the internet? RO02g7: It’s pretty bad. That’s because, if we stay too much at the laptop, our eyes are gonna hurt. Researcher: Uhm. Did your eyes hurt or somebody told you about it? RO02g7: Mom told me. Yes, if I stay too much. Because there’s too much light. (She suggestively start rubbing her eye, researcher was close to RO02g7, at the computer) Researcher: And now your eyes hurt? I see you’re rubbing your eyes? RO02g7: A little.’ (RO02g7) Other health issues, correlated to obesity and sedentariness are explicitly excluded by some of the parents, who consider the sedentariness entailed by the use of digital technology is countered by the exercise or the sports kids participate to (if any) – or even by the mere outdoor time of the children. Only one child in our sample spontaneously approached, in a critical manner, the excessive gaming of his parents: ‘RO06b8: Mom’s the one playing Candy Crash, nonstop! She used to take my tablet and change the time on it, so it regenerates it to her. You have some trials or something… Researcher: And what do you think about her playing nonstop? 57 | 09 February 2016 RO06b8: I mean she was there all the time, when she had the time, she was only sitting there, on it (the game). Researcher: And you’re not doing just like her, do you? RO06b8: No. Not really, I play other games too, but she was only playing that one.’ (RO06b8) The unsuitable content for children, either we talk about violence or sexuality, appear as a concern in the discourse of most of the parents (with the exception of RO06 and RO07). Although they mention incidents when the children accidentally encountered some sort of sexual content, the parents tend to consider that’s not currently a problem, as long as they don’t actively search for such content. To them, more stringent to cope with is the violent content, which RO05m35 sees as a sine qua non feature of the games: ‘RO05m35: They all have to include some fighting aspect. The dinosaurs had to fight and kill each other and any game has, ultimately, something violent in it.’ (RO05m35) A specific concern correlated to violent content is the algorithm used (especially) by YouTube to suggest content. The suggestion mechanism makes many parents feel unsecure and be on alert, monitoring the child’s activity online, or taking technical measures to restrict the respective content: ‘RO05m35: I’m not interfering, but I am careful about the films. From one video to another, as Youtube suggests, it’s likely they may get to something very violent. Except this, it’s their business how they play (online).’ (RO05m35) ‘RO01m45: (recounting how she got to set the parental control on YouTube) So I think I bumped into something myself, initially and realized, look, one click away there’s a film potentially… (she hesitates, beat) I don’t remember what it was, exactly. Something aggressive. (much more confident) And then I searched for the setting. I guess that must have been the case. So at first I didn’t think to do such a thing, because the child was too small – she was, I don’t know, two or three, I thought she’s got no place to get there, but look at that!, I was showing videos to her, she was curious and clicked, let me see this one, and that one and the other one – she was seeing the previews – and I realized she could get to click on one which is not ok. And then I searched the settings.’ (RO01m45) Related to the inappropriate content, other parents believe that self regulation works for their children, as they will reject some content intrinsically. But there’s a major difference between the parents with low formal and media education – who worry much about the explicit aspects of violence (blood, shootings) (RO08) and the more educated parents, with a higher and critical media literacy, who tend to judge things on screens correlated to the current intellectual and emotional development of the child. ‘Researcher: But do you have specific rules such as, no violence? RO08m26: Yes, but she doesn’t watch (violence, nAV&MM) because she doesn’t like it. The same with these games. There are some girls playing bang-bang; she’s been at a friend’s birthday and they were playing on the computer. And they played those shooting games, the blood was gushing out from that poor fellow. No, she was afraid and wasn’t looking. I mean, she doesn’t want to watch.’ (RO08) 58 | 09 February 2016 ‘Researcher: Except the time of use rules, do you have any rules regarding violent content? RO06b8: Not necessarily. But they say: ‘if you like it and it doesn’t bother you at night, then it’s ok’. But I am not affected if I see blood or something, only if the graphic is very good. For instance, the GTA: GTA1 has a very bad graphic and GTA5 has the most realistic graphic. I mean, exactly as it is. And yes, that affects me.’ (RO06) 3.3. How do parents manage their younger children’s use of (online) technologies? 3.3.1. The existence of the rules When asked, most of the parents tended to reject the idea they might guide themselves upon some clear and explicit rules when mediating the use by the child of the digital technology, as they see rules as not yet necessary. And where the parent directly asserts the existence of those rules, they are an extension of their general parenting style and have nothing to do with the child’s interaction with technology: ‘RO01m45: That’s what I mean, she knows there are some rules, not to watch too much, not to watch in some moments, to first do the things you have to do first, such as homework, to go somewhere, to do... So she’s got rules. I am the champion of rules, the child needs rules!’ (RO01m45) When going deeper on the ‘rules’ subject, things don’t look so loose, with various rules at play. Thus, beyond the universal rule ‘no paid applications,’ there are some time of use rules, content rules, contact rules (for those kids who already have an account on a social media or communication platform) and another, rather special and singular, ‘one game a week’ rule (RO03). In what concerns the time of use, a big difference appears to exist between children 5 to 6 and those 7 to 8 years old. The older kids get to have homework to do so their parents schedule a special homework time, as digital technologies are secondary, in their opinion; thus, the time dedicated to the use of technology comes right after doing their homework. ‘RO02m27: Ok, yes. So she doesn’t need any laptop or computer until she’s done her homework. And I don’t let her do it in a hurry. So yes, that’s a rule. She’s not to come home and hop on to the computer, on this and that and in the evening to get to realize, oh, my God, there’s homework to be done. No. She’s coming home, she’s washing up, changing clothes, eating and then she tackles the homework.’ (RO02m27) ‘RO06b8: My parents don’t let me (use it), until I’ve done my homework and only after 7 PM they will let me, next week (the interview took place in the first week of school, when the rules were not that well established, n. AV&MM). So it’s not so much the time as a quantity, but as, starting with what hour. But that’s only during school. In vacations, they don’t enforce any restrictions on me. So after I finish my homework and only after 7 PM. And 59 | 09 February 2016 even if I finish them at 3 PM, it’s still after seven. Or if there’s no homework, he will give me something to do, quick – and they let me – but it’s only in that case (they don’t stick to 7 PM rule, n. AV&MM).’ (RO06b8) The time limiting rule is shaped, in the above cases, by the child’s school duties. There are situations where the parents have time of use rules regardless the school calendar and the child’s school duties, guided exclusively by a concern related to the excessive use. In this case, parents do not measure the time in abstract units of time (hours, minutes), but in content units (RO01, RO07, RO10), some of them claiming explicitly that this choice is more adequate, unlike the rigid and abstract approach (specific to other cultural spaces). ‘RO07f38: Our cousins’ parents, from America, were having strict rules regarding the computer (use). RO07m38: Yes, but it’s enforced slightly different. They establish time rules with actual time I mean, half an hour, three quarters of an hour. Or, you’ve got five minutes left. We, or at least I, put it like, ‘ok, I’ll let you (watch) two more cartoons. Or, you do that thing and only afterwards, that’s it.’ (RO07) In what concerns content related rules, these tackle mainly the violent content (with mothers of boys especially concerned, RO04 and RO05) and the ‘indecent’ or ‘vulgar’ aspects (all the families’ members choosing to avoid harsh terms such as ‘sexuality’ or ‘pornography’). If the mothers consider it necessary to monitor the children in their activities in order to control the violence-related content (RO04, RO10) and sometimes even check the device from time to time (RO05), for the ‘indecent’ content, parents in general rules are sufficiently internalized by the child, so he/she does not need extra monitoring for rule enforcing. ‘Researcher: But does she have any restrictions regarding the games she could download? RO11m37: Yes, naturally. Researcher: What is she not allowed to download? RO11m37: Restrictions. She knows there are rules – there are certain games she is not allowed to. Within the limits of decency.’ (RO11) Although many kids in the Romanian sample have access to their parents’ Facebook accounts and access them from time to time and look at the pictures (RO02, RO03, RO08, RO10), and some of them even initiate conversations or post messages, parents do not impose clear contact rules at this level, considering them only as (temporary) visitors around there or seeing them from the onset as ‘safe’ as long as they are logged in the parents’ account – regardless the fact it’s a public account (RO08). Yet, when the child has his or her own Facebook or Skype account, the parent explicitly asserts the rule of not accepting friendship request from other persons that the ones the child knows from the real life. ‘RO02m27: She doesn’t add, she doesn’t do nothing. I said, ‘see, if a friend request is made towards you, you don’t add anybody without my consent.’ And she doesn’t add up anybody. She doesn’t interfere (with my account, nMM).’ (RO02m27) ‘RO06f47: Well, there was a time when her mother said she received a friend request from somebody and she overreacted: oh my, but you can’t accept it. Well yes, but he only had received the request; he wasn’t going to accept it, because he didn’t know who that person was.’ (RO06f47) 60 | 09 February 2016 A unique rule was revealed to being enforced in RO02, where the father came up with a ‘no more than one application per week’ rule. Although we didn’t grasp the rationale behind this (since the child and the parent were interviewed by the two respective researcher at the same time, so there was no time to confront or cross-interpret the data), we can rule out the possibility it would be an attempt to limit the data download, given the fact they had an wifi in the house, with no restrictions. A speculation from our part would be to assume that that was an attempt to prevent the ‘zapping’ tendency where the child approaches technologies in general and games in particular in a superficial, unstable manner. Thus, it happens that the child’s main activity is rather that of downloading and then deleting the games he or she does not engage quite well with, instead of attempting to understand the game mechanism and actively engage with it. ‘RO03g7: I can only download a new game after one week. Researcher: And why’s that? RO03g7: Because das said I could install a new game after one week. Researcher: So are you happy with that pace or you’d like it to happen rather often than a week? RO03g7: I’d rather want it more often.’ (RO03g7) The kids seem, at this age, to agree with their parents’ rules and to comply with them. Nevertheless, in some cases, the rules parent present to the researchers are an attempt of ‘maintaining the face’ of a ‘good parent’ (Goffman, 1967), the child denying them afterwards (as it happens in family RO11). But most often, the rules seem to be real, in which case the child recognizes them and complies with them; some of the kids also understand their parents’ concern beyond a rule even when they would like that rule not to exist: ‘Researcher: Your dad said there are rules regarding the time spent on the tablet. RO11g6: What rules? Researcher: Meaning you’re not allowed to stay too long on the tablet, for instance... RO11g6 (Starts laughing): No, when I play, dad doesn’t even know I do, kinda.’ (RO11g6) Researcher: How do these rules appear to you? RO06b8: I observe them, but I’d rather not. Still, I understand them, I know why, why not stay with the tablet and complain, no, look, I have to do that and that...’ Researcher: You mean, to get in the situation where your homework is not done? RO06b8: Yes. Stalling until 7 PM and then doing it at the last minute.’ (RO06b8) Nevertheless, in the families where the parenting style is not very demanding, negotiations may appear between children and parents regarding rules – negotiations that the child usually wins. And except the flexibility of the parents, there are two more factors responsible for the situation where the parent loses the negotiation; these factors either act together, or separately. First, it is a matter of the extent to which the parent believes in that respective rule. Many times the parents impose some rules, based on a social pressure or a momentary emotion, which does not hold water on a critical analysis of the necessities and of their real 61 | 09 February 2016 efficiency. In these cases, the parents with a higher education and a more critical approach give up the rule as a result of negotiating with the child, thus demonstrating that the argument and its rationality, and not the power situation they are in are decisive in a discussion. The parents with a lower formal education either give in, each time, regardless the rationality and the pertinence of the arguments of the child (thus, the act of giving in constitutes their general mediation style for each issue, not only when mediating the child’s relationship with technology), or they stick to the rules, no matter how absurd they might seem. The second factor contributing to parents giving in, in their confrontation with the child, is the existence of a disagreement between the two parents on what their mediation should be, concerning that technology use. Thus, in some families the disagreement occurs regarding the acquisition of the technological devices (RO08); in others, regarding the time of use (RO05) or the more general mediation (panics and interdiction versus supportive, RO06). The children sense the existence of such disagreement and many times try, sometimes, successfully, other times, unsuccessfully, to get their consent – with each parent at a time: ‘RO08m26: Whatever she sees on TV: ‘dad, I also want that’. With me, it’s not that easy for her. RO08g6: Dad’s the only one that buys that to me. Mom doesn’t let him do it... RO08m26: But with her father, she immediately goes shopping. It doesn’t matter how much it costs.’ (RO08) ‘RO05m35: No, no. The time of use control it’s only set on the PSP. (she laughs) And herein lays the difference between ‘mom’ and ‘dad’. Whom he manipulates easier. The PSP has a time setting and only dad knows the password. I think it’s only 30 minutes (the time of use for children, nAV&MM) Dad is the one who would totally forbid it. Mom, he gets to convince her more often than he convinces dad. Researcher: But why would dad forbid it? He seems quite involved in the digital life. RO05m35: He is. But the more involved he is, the more he restricts it to them. Since we spend the whole day, everyday, staring at the computer, because of our jobs.’ (RO05) In family RO06 the disagreement between parents starts from their different perception on technologies. The father sees it as a sine qua non ingredient of our current lives and tries to use it as efficiently and teach the child to use it just the same, while the mother sees it as a time wasting thing (as the child mentions, the mother tends to use time wasting, compulsive apps such as Candy Crush), potentially dangerous, one they should restrict from a force position the parent (always) has. According to the father, he enforces his position and view onto his wife and still keeps an open attitude towards the child, so that he gets to trust he would find support in his parents. ‘RO06f47: Well, there was a moment when his mother saw he’d received a friendship request from somebody and overreacted: oh, my, you can’t accept it! (…) No, no, keep calm, he didn’t do anything, nothing happened. If you react this way, he won’t come talk to you afterwards, he will not come ask you. Chill out, answer him smiling, explain to him what’s all this about, don’t take it like that.’ (RO06f47) 62 | 09 February 2016 Still, other times, without any disagreement between the parents, their mediation styles are different. To that we may add that sometimes the parents share their responsibility of mediation, allocating a particular device to one of them – as it happens in RO05, where the father is in charge with mediating the laptop use, while the mother mediates the tablet use. Thus, the mother is in favour of a more unobtrusive mediation, from the shadows, which would give the boys some space – but in safety – a space where they will discover new applications by themselves and she would monitor them in order to prevent them from getting in unpleasant situations (e.g. accidentally getting to some contents that she considers worrisome) and would help them with advice which would make their browsing easier and more efficient. The father is more rigid in what concerns the time of use and more active in showing the child his own discoveries or passions online. ‘Researcher: In general, is your father the one showing you the games? RO05b7: Yes, it’s daddy. Daddy. Researcher: And on the tablet? RO05b7: No, on the tablet I download them myself. RO05m35: At the laptop, he only plays with his father. I don’t interfere.’ (RO05) Another difference in what concerns the mediation styles in RO05 is the place of the child. For the mother, the child is the focus of her attention, and her punctual interventions are aimed towards correcting or improving the child’s current relationship with technology. During the interview, the researcher witnessed such a technological mediation episode (the boy was taking pictures with the researcher’s tablet and asked her for the unlock code, nAV&MM), and the mother acted naturally, without being pedantic, presenting the advice as a ‘trick’: ‘RO05m35: Do you want me to teach you a trick? RO05b7: Yes. RO05m35: In order to access the camera directly, you push here and then roll up from here. (RO05b7 laughs happily)’ (RO05) On the other hand, the father, even if more active in mediating the use of technologies, starts from his own passions which he shares with the child, in the hope that the child would get to like it – thus, he approaches the child as a partner in his own digital world (the father’s). 3.3.2. Monitoring, Supervision, Control Just as the mother in family RO05, other parents monitor and control the children internet activities or the content they access. Thus, some parents check them only in order to be sure the kids have not accessed any worrisome contents (for parents) (RO04f30 regularly checks the browsing history on the computer), while others (RO03f41 is a typical example) are much more intrusive as they do not respect the private space of the child – the tablet, in this case – and delete content even when it’s not necessary, when the child has no harmful apps on the tablet; their rationale is to periodically bring back the tablet to that T0, the initial moment, where it has no personality (just as their home, which emanates an impersonal air). ‘RO03f41: But I look in it and I see exactly what she has accessed. 63 | 09 February 2016 Researcher: And you check it once a week – or more often, less often? RO03f41: When I get the tablet, I take it and look in it. I usually delete them. I delete the whole history so that she… Well, the games and stuff still remain, but I delete everything else. Researcher: So what has been downloaded gets to stay. And if she wants to watch again a song she watched before, she has to search it herself, all over again? RO03f41: Yes, she searches it again … Researcher: I mean, she can’t go back to that safe, warm place she’s been? RO03f41: No, she starts all over again.’ (RO03) This interference of the parent in the child’s personal space is not only specific to smaller kids, but happens even when they grow older – some parents bring up with the same ingenuity their strict control over the older brothers of the child interviewed. ‘Researcher: Are their tablets code-protected? RO11m37: No, no. They wanted to, at some point, but I didn’t allow them. Just in case we, the parents, would like to… I, for one, I am checking (them) a lot; Elena (RO11g11) also has a Facebook account and I am in direct contact – well, Elena doesn’t hide it, but I check her conversations and all her chats.’ (RO11) The same tension between the use by the child of the mobile devices perceived as ‘personal’ (and, thus, part of the child’s private space) and the desire of being a ‘good parent’, in control of the child’s online life and of showing this is also revealed in other interviews. Thus, RO08m29 has a double speech on controlling the device, determined by the same tension: ‘RO09m29: I really don’t know, ‘cause we don’t have much access to this tablet. We rarely get to put our hand on it. It’s his and he’s the one who plays on it. He gets the games – the games he wants – he deletes them… Only rarely he tells his father that he can’t do something, tablet related, that it has blocked it or who knows what else happened. Later on, when asked if she controls her kid’s activities, she has another discourse, displaying the image of the engaged parent: ‘Researcher: But you do take it from time to time and check it, so to say? RO09m29: Yes, we do watch, we don’t leave him be. There are these websites that give… where you can find that type of films, dirty films. And he gets them unwittingly, without knowing what it is. But he’s not going around online. More on the Magazine Google Play and that’s it. We check it more for the viruses, that now even the viruses put in these porn films and so we look for it – and that’s about it. He’s not a bad boy.’ (RO09m29) 3.3.3. Technological mediation Most of the parents are not aware of the parental control options available or have a vague idea of what those might be. And even when explained what these are, they still see them as a restrictive tool for when children could be tempted to search for inadequate content – and 64 | 09 February 2016 not a protection tool against bumping into such content by accident. Thus, they reject it as not necessary for the moment, most of the time using the ‘trust’ argument (the trust they have in their kids) or they see it as a useful tool for the future, when the kids will adventure more, in their online searches. ‘RO10m39: (after she’s explained what that is) Right. They don’t have any parental control (option activated) and I don’t think I’m going to activate such a thing, since I want them to listen to my words and observe. I want to go on trust. And if they will enter by mistake, well then it’s a mistake, they don’t know where they’re going. Researcher: Don’t you find necessary to protect them – in case they accidentally bump into some inadequate content? RO10m39: Later on, yes. I will protect them. As I said, I will find somebody to install something of this kind. Yes, it’s good. Later on, if I will install it, I will do it in order to prevent their accidental accessing of something.’ (RO10m39) ‘RO11f41: No (they don’t have parental control - n.AV&MM), I didn’t caught them accessing some other things than those I know of. I mean if I’d catch them, I would come up with that parental control solution. But they don’t have such activities.’ (RO11f41) Also, it is remarkable how this parental control option is generally placed in direct connection to the content itself and, and not with the time of use. Only one family talks about the parental control they have installed on the PSP in order to limit the time of use (RO05). In two of the families they have set a certain parental control option – in one of them, on the child’s device (RO06), and in the other, on the YouTube account on the mother’s computer, given the fact that the kid does not have access to a wifi internet connection on her own device and thus this thing was seen as not necessary (RO01). ‘RO01m45: YouTube is secured for children. There are the security settings in YouTube. There’s a certain type of content that won’t be showed.’ (RO01m45) We should notice that in both these families the parents are aware of the risks entailed by the social media; RO06f47 talks about the limits of such a parental control setting in what concerns Facebook, while RO01m45 notices that the YouTube security settings stop the users’ comments, a source of concerns for her. 3.3.4. Punishment / reward system Most of the parents admit using digital technologies in a punishment/reward system, with various nuances: RO01 only uses the TV watching in this manner, not the tablet; in RO03, RO08, RO09, they admit is more the threat of a punishment than the punishment itself, while RO06f47 argues it is only normal to be this way as long as, in the punishment/reward method, central in education, you can only use the child’s favorite toy, and, if that happens to be a digital device, then it is only natural that the parent uses it. 65 | 09 February 2016 3.3.5. Active mediation The majority of the parents in the sample are involved in some form of active mediation of the child’s digital life, sometimes on all the devices the child has access to or owns, and sometimes only on some of them. Thus, the initial operational competencies are learnt from the parents in an overt learning session; it’s only seldom that these get to be learnt from observing the parent’s interaction with the technology. We here refer to the initial operational competences such as opening, shutting down, downloading, deleting apps, etc. – especially for the touch screen devices, whose entering the family the children can remember, unlike the entering the family of the computer or other older devices (which, in some of the families, ‘were in the house since forever’). ‘RO02g7: Mom taught me how to use a touch screen.’ (RO02g7) ‘RO01m45: Well, I think dad showed it to her, since I don’t know how to… Dad showed her the download center and especially some peaceful games and anyways it’s with parental control, so it’s safe! She doesn’t know how to access the internet… At the beginning, her dad showed her how to open it, where the games are, where the folders are, but I don’t think he needed to show her anything twice...’ (RO01m45) Some parents stop here (especially those who delegate the rest of the teaching process to an older sibling, if any and if that older sibling is considered adept and responsible enough), others continue being there for the child, explaining and guiding him or her how to use various applications. If the first stage usually happens at the parent’s initiative, once the device enters the family, the second stage appears many times at the child’s request, usually determined by a punctual interest in something. Sometimes the parent answers the request through a ‘dedicated lesson’ in which he or she explains the child the whole process, all the steps one has to go through in order to do something (as the following example, RO02); and sometimes the parent gives the child some hints and leave him or her to discover the rest, although this strategy proves to be ineffective, at times. For instance, RO10m39 answered in parallel, during the interview, both to the researcher’s questions and the incessant requests from RO10b5 (the boy kept asking, ‘and now, what do I do?’ ‘where do I have to push on now?’) to help him play a keyboard controls game, one that was obviously beyond his competency. ‘RO02m27: Well, at first, I showed her. She stood by me and saw. For instance, ‘Mom, how could I get to listen to Youtube music? I wanna listen to music by Violetta on Youtube.’ ‘Well, you type like that, you type Youtube and then you enter Youtube and then, on a small branch you can find Violetta videos. And now she’s doing it herself, she’s self-sufficient.’ (RO02m27) The precise situations where the child calls the parent to help out are quite varied, the kids sometimes need assistance even in typing the codes or various search words, in Romanian or in English (RO04, RO05, RO07, RO08, RO09), other times, they need guidance in order to play some games (RO10), to search information online (RO02, RO07), to express themselves in the public space or to install games. 66 | 09 February 2016 As one can see in the quotes below (recorded one week apart), RO06b8 already has a clear idea on the importance of self-presentation online, an idea he got from his father: ‘Researcher: And you ask your father when you don’t know something? RO06b8: Yes, when it comes to Facebook, yeah. And to many other things. (...) You know, on Facebook it’s like… it doesn’t matter, with friends – it doesn’t matter if you type the comma or not (he talks about the diacritical signs and punctuation marks, nAV&MM); we use these in school anyway. I know that, on the internet, the writing is more erroneous. But if I have to write something public, I ask him how to write it.’ (RO06b8) ‘RO06f47: And I tried to explain nicely and calmly that it’s very important the spelling and that the others notice such things. And that could make a difference one day, so it’s a good thing to learn the spelling, including online. Forget about the others: they don’t know, it’s their own business. But I’d like you to know, right? And I can see he’s careful about this.’ (RO06f47) The parent takes the initiative and starts to actively mediate when he wants to broaden the child’s view on what the internet is (showing the child how many types of content one can find online) or when he/she wants to teach the child how to use it as efficiently, thus deepening the child’s knowledge. This third active mediation stage appears especially at parents with a higher formal education, who use digital technologies in their everyday lives and also for work related purposes. ‘RO07f38: I want to teach him how to better use Google, but it’s frustrating, because for what he needs to know, he has to write in English. I showed him an aikido master on YouTube and some aikido movements. Now I don’t know if he would’ve thought of searching it himself. But now that I showed it to him, he’s got the initiative of searching for it himself.’ (RO07f38) 3.3.6. The active mediation challenges In general, the literature presents active mediation as the ideal solution in ensuring the child’s access to the most of the opportunities of the internet, as well as for diminishing the harm in encountering risky situation, by an increased resilience (Helsper et al., 2013, Duerager & Livingstone, 2012). Nevertheless, our research showed that some of the mediation practices covered by this concept may present some traps for this particular age. Thus, in some situations, the parent’s permanent presence near the child to help him/her out may represent, in a first phase, a delay in getting some of the competences, given the fact that the child takes refuge in an ‘assisted’ position, even if he/she could easily learn those things. For instance, although RO01g6 has complex digital competences and knows how to use the tablet, where her mother refuses to help, but she doesn’t know how to use the DVD player by herself, and needs her mother’s help. A similar story was told by RO05m35 about her younger son (RO05b3): ‘RO05m35: The password – he once typed in himself. Which makes me think that he knows it, but, I don’t know how, he doesn’t want to. Researcher: And if nobody types it in for him? 67 | 09 February 2016 RO05m35: He follows us around: the password, the password, I don’t know the password. And he finds somebody to do it for him.’ (RO05m35) Assuming the assisted person position and not acquiring a skill of independent device use (in the circumstances where a child has far more complex skills than the strictly operational ones, so that the researcher may believe the child could acquire those skills) was also revealed in a situation where an older brother helps out (RO04). 3.3.7. The parent as a model Some parents were aware they are a role model for their child even in the way they use and relate to the older or newer media, beyond the advice they give actively and consciously. This type of awareness appears especially at the more educated parents: RO01m45: I sometimes read in the evening, but now I can’t even… Yeah, so she didn’t have any models, indeed (in what concerns reading, nAV&MM).’ (RO01m45) ‘RO05m35: And I taught them or they’ve seen when I was playing – when those little ads appear, they are not to click on them – or if a video pops up or something, they should hit the X.’ (RO05m35) Quite contrary, other parents (RO03 and RO09) are not aware of this mimetic process and, because they see themselves as lacking digital competencies, they say that the person who teaches or will teach the child or the children to use technologies is their life partner (usually, the father, perceived as more skillful and more technical in general). Still, the child uses to indicate the mother as the more skillful parent among the two and as the knowledge spring, mimetically learning from her. Thus, it seems that the child doesn’t choose as a model the most skillful parent, but the closest one, and understanding this preference would prove necessary for a more efficient parental mediation in what concerns the use of digital technologies by children. 3.3.8. Sibling mediation When there’s an older brother or sister in the family and the age difference between them is of a few years, the older brother is ‘delegated’ by the parent the task of mediating the activity of the younger. In this case, mediation doesn’t happen under the form of ‘rules’ to restrict the use (time of use, content rules), but as an active mediation, with a focus on how to, what one must do and what one mustn’t. ‘Researcher: Does she ask, for each of the games she wants, if she is allowed to download them? RO11m37: Yeah, yeah, but she doesn’t ask me, she asks her sister, usually they’re next to each other. RO11g6: And I know which ones I can’t to download. Well, Elena (RO11g11) taught me which ones are for money and which ones are for free. 68 | 09 February 2016 RO11m37: They ask me not that often, but her sister is permanently near her, teaching her. (...) Elena has taught her a lot of things, she’s a special kid, in that respect. And she shows her, teaches her.’ (RO11) Yet, there’s another sibling mediation logic (in RO05, RO05b7 acts this way towards RO05b3), when the older brother role doesn’t bring along an automatic responsibility, but needs to be permanently (re)asserted by exhibiting superior knowledge; in other words, what he teaches the younger brother is that him, the older brother, knows things, not that he cares for his younger brother. Nevertheless, mediation is effective. 3.4. Surprising findings Some parents see parenting the digital lives of children as optional and surprisingly decide not to involve in it. Thus, some parents who are otherwise very dedicated to their children’ education, teaching them critical media education among others, suddenly withdraw when it comes to the digital world or certain specific devices (RO01 stays away from mobile and convergent media, including when it comes to their use by her daughter, RO01g6). The absence of her mother in her use of mobile technologies is visible in the daughter’s digital skills, but not at an operational level, since she knows, intuitively, what does she have to do in order to play games, but at the level of understanding the functionality and of verbalizing the operations she performed. Thus, in the activities she’s accompanied (supported/assisted) by her mother, the girl is able to explain in complex sentences and rich vocabulary what she does, what does she have to do, what she must do, how to. This competence stops suddenly when it comes to her digital world activities. Another specific finding is the lack of availability from parents when it comes to investing in quality content and their exclusive preference for ‘free’ content. It is not just a matter of not investing money, but also spending the time to search such quality content. For the majority of the parents, the digital technology is limited to the device itself. The children see things a little more nuanced, some of them, with a lower level of digital competencies are more attracted by the physical devices, regardless their capabilities and their actual further use, while others, who already have clear interests in some content (games or other apps) prefer to refer at this content as being important, and not solely the physical device. In the same line, the lack of interest from the parents’ part in what happens with the device, how it is actually used makes that the only criterion when it comes to acquisition to be its price. These cheap devices prove to be less reliable, and so, they broke easily; but the majority of parents do not consider also purchasing maintenance costs; instead, they eliminate by default any concern for the device, once acquired. Thus, many times the acquisition proves to be rather restricting than offering real opportunities. If traditionally children used to learn quicker how to read than how to write, digital technologies (among other factors) seem to favor the writing, as many of the children who are familiar with the letters being more willing to write than read. Thus, RO01g6 knows the letters and writes ‘books’ (stories she writes, with capital letters, on sheets of papers her mother has to ‘bind’ together, afterwards) but does not read by herself; the same for RO10b5, who writes in Word processor, one of his favorite games, says the 69 | 09 February 2016 mother – lists of people important to him, but, again, he doesn’t read. This inversion of the traditional order of activities related to ‘literacy’ can be explained by the fact that the digital world requires a type of engagement where writing remains a key element: after launching a search the results can be text, video, images, games, but the search itself still relies on the written text. It is possible this might change in the near future, with the perfecting of the various software for vocal recognition in other languages than English; RO10b6 had already tried to initiate vocal searches on Google, but was only successful with short words and after many trials. Not that surprisingly, given the fact there is still some literature on this subject (Vancea & Olivera, 2013, Madianou & Miller, 2013), but important enough as to dedicate it some indepth research it seems to us the important role of technology in the families where one parent is away, working abroad. This is a frequent situation in Romania, where many women left for other European countries for work (for various periods of time, from a few weeks, seasonal work in agriculture, to several months or even years), leaving the children at home, to be taken care by the father or by the grandparents (Toth et al., 2007). For these children, the digital technologies represent the gate through which they have access to their absent parent(s) and not just an accessory in their live – thus becoming a primary need. There are major differences between the competences of use for the two main operating systems on the mobile devices, with a clear preference of children for the Android, as the IOS is perceived as ‘too difficult’ by the children. We don’t know if that is the result of the poor penetration of the iPads in Romania (or there’s a circular determination between the two facts), but in the families where there is an iPad, there is also an Android based tablet. If previous research (Chaudron et al., 2015) showed parents tend to postpone worrying, by placing the risks somewhere in the future, our research confirmed it and showed parents perceive the opportunities offered by digital technologies in the same manner – as available only to the older children. Teachers share the same perception on future opportunities (through the information the internet offers, usually in a written form), destined to older ages and postpone using digital technologies for educational purposes for later. Parents tend to mediate differently the digital life of their children, being more available for actively mediating the older child (actively involving in the search of educational content). In these cases, technology can in fact substitute the parent’s laziness or indifference, as it leaves the younger children a heritage of downloaded apps (the download history remains in the cloud, in AppStore (RO05b3 knows he can only download the apps with a little cloud, which are, in fact, educational apps the mother had downloaded to the older brother), when they use the same account – or even on the tablet itself, it that one is handed down to the younger brother, as it happens in RO09. 70 | 09 February 2016 4. DIGCOMP framework All along the report, the issue of the digital competencies these children have was repeatedly covered, especially in Findings Section, many times in connection with the parents’ competencies or with a focus on how they got to get these competencies. In this section we shall approach the digital competencies matter within the framework of the DIGCOMP reference grid (Ferrari, 2013; see Annex DIGCOMP framework) which aims to assess the general digital competencies (i.e. it was not elaborated especially for children). Three were the objectives we followed in this section: 1. To get to evaluate each child’s level of competencies (for the main respondent of each family) according to that grid; 2. To assess the level of the Romanian sample digital competencies as a whole, but without generalizing, given the qualitative research limitations; 3. To critically assess the adequacy of this grid in measuring the digital competencies of very little children (0 to 8). 4.1. Evaluation of each child’s digital skills Two steps were taken for our first objective: each child was assessed upon the DIGCOMP grid – whether he or she possesses each of the 25 skills and to what extent (basic, independent or proficiency) (see Table 3). Then, in Table 4 we gave a more substantial depiction of the digital skills each child has, structuring them in the five categories that were kept from DIGCOMP grid (i.e. searching for information, communication and collaboration skills, content creation, safety skills and problem solving). T ABLE 3: R OMANIAN CHILDREN ' S DIGITAL SKILLS ACCORDING TO DIGCOMP GRID RO01 g6 RO02 g7 RO03 g7 RO04 g6 RO05 b7 RO06 b8 RO07 b6 RO08 g6 RO09 b6 RO10 b5 RO11 g6 1 BU** BU** BU** BU** PU** BU** BU** BU** BU** BU** 2 BU** NTY NTY BU** BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY IU** NTY NTY NTY NTY BU** BU** BU** NTY PU** NTY BU** NTY NTY BU** NTY NTY NTY IU** NTY BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY 3 NTY 4 NTY 5 NTY 6 NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY 7 BU** BU** BU** BU** BU** PU** BU** BU** BU** BU** NTY NTY IU** NTY NTY NTY NTY BU** BU** BU** BU** BU** BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY 8 BU** BU** 9 BU** BU** BU** BU** BU** 10 BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY 11 NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY BU** 12 13 NTY 14 NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY PU** NTY NTY NTY NTY 15 NTY BU** NTY NTY NTY IU** NTY NTY NTY NTY 16 NTY BU** BU** NTY NTY PU** NTY NTY NTY 17 BU** NTY BU** NTY NTY BU** NTY NTY BU** NTY 71 | 09 February 2016 18 IU** 19 PU** IU** IU** NTY 20 NTY 21 BU*** BU** BU** BU** BU** IU** BU** BU** BU** BU* BU** 22 BU** BU** BU** BU** BU** IU** BU** BU** BU** BU** BU** 23 NTY BU** NTY NTY NTY IU** BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY 24 NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY IU** NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY 25 NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY BU** NTY NTY NTY NTY NTY (*) observed (**)self-evaluation or reported by another member of the family (***) researcher evaluation (BU) – “Basic user” (IU) – “Independent user” (PU) – “Proficiency user” (NTY) - “Not there yet” - the researcher evaluated that the child is not capable of the task The entry is left empty when the researcher did not know how to score, as they did not have enough information RO01g6 The child T ABLE 4: T HE MAIN DIGITAL SKILLS R OMANIAN CHILDREN HAVE Searching information Communication and collaboration skills Content creation Safety skills Problem solving -she doesn’t search for information as she is not interested in anything her mother cannot answer, but also because she doesn’t have wifi internet connection at home; - she doesn’t use the internet to communicate; she can produce simple digital content (she takes photos using her tablet or her camera); -she doesn’t seem aware of the possible risks on the internet (e.g. viruses, personal information being stolen) and she doesn’t protect her device accordingly; -she does have some basic operational skills (install/ delete apps, start/ close the tablet, search for an internet connection); -but she looks for apps on her own when she goes to a place where she can connect to the internet. - she is aware of the communication and collaboration tools such as Facebook and blogs (that her mother uses). -she also used to use an app to create puzzles from the photos she already has in her mother’s computer. -she’s not aware of the possible health issues; -she’s very careful to close all the apps she doesn’t use, in order to save the battery life. -she doesn’t use digital technology to solve offline problem (e.g. school problem), nor she is aware of this possibility; -when necessary, she asks for support from her father. 72 | 09 February 2016 RO04g6 RO03g7 RO02g7 - she can look for information online and she actually does it when interested in an issue (e.g. to buy a puppy or information on Violetta); - she does know that not all the online information is evenly reliable and that there are fake pages (on Facebook, for example). - she can use Skype and she communicates daily with her mother using this app; - she can and she loves taking pictures with a smartphone - she’s aware of some of the internet risks (viruses and information that could be stolen); - she is also aware about the health effects of extensive internet use and tries to make a reasonable use of the digital technology in order to the correlated avoid health issues. - even though she hasn’t had a FB account yet, she knows about it and communicate with her mother this way using her mother’s account. - she has an accurate image of the digital technologies as useful tools and is able to solve routine problems; - when needed, she asks her mother for support and help. - she is aware about the communication rules that apply online. - she is able to look for information online (she searches not only for cartoons, but also UGC –vlogs) and she is also able to search for apps: -she independently uses her mother’s Facebook account in order to communicate with some relatives; -it is very likely that she knows not all information is evenly reliable, as her father made a point on this during his interview, but the girl didn’t express her opinion on this matter. -is not very clear if she’s aware of the existence of special online conventions in communication. - she performs basic searches starting from Google (on the computer), but not always successful (as she does not know to write, she has the keywords written by her brother on a piece of paper). - she is aware of the existence of Facebook and used to use her brother’s Facebook account to communicate with a friend. - she takes pictures with her tablet and her camera; - she also likes to paint and draw on the computer. -she is aware of some online risks but she doesn’t take steps on her own, as her father already protected her device with an antivirus and other tools; - she is also aware of the possible impact of extensive use of technology on her health; -she is able to perform basic activities on both computer and tablet (open / close them, download and delete apps); -when she needs support, she asks for help from her father. - in order to save the battery life of the tablet, she takes active steps (e.g. closes the inactive apps, disable wifi). - she can take pictures with her brother’s smartphone or her mother’s older mobile phone; - she also used to draw with the help of an online game but didn’t save her creations. -even though she is aware of the existence of viruses, she is not in the position to take steps to protect a digital device, as she doesn’t own any. -she knows how to run basic operation on the computer and on her brother’s devices; - when she needs it, she turns to her brother for help. 73 | 09 February 2016 - he does not engage in online communication (j ust rarely, he talk with his aunt using Face Time, but his mother initiates the conversation); he is nevertheless aware of the existence of SNSs and their communicational role (he encourages his mother to share on her Facebook account photos of him in order to be seen by friends and relatives. - he’s able to take pictures with his tablet and he also knows how to take screenshots. - he doesn’t seem to have any safety awareness, nor he does something special in order to avoid the online risks. -he is one of the few children who know that, apart from his parents to whom he could ask for help when needed, he could also find support online in playing different games (e.g. he knows about the codes helping one to better play a game and he also knows about the help menu); -he solves routine problems and also developed some personal patterns to complete some tasks (e.g. he has a folder where he temporarily moves the apps he doesn’t use much and prepares himself to delete them). - he knows how to efficiently run searches on topics he is interested in (he searches for video tutorials, for comments and posts in online communities etc.); - still, it doesn’t occur to him to look online for school information, considering this behaviour as a sort of cheating. - he subscribes to other people’s Youtube channels to keep updated when they upload new content; - he knows how to save the information he is interested in for a later use (takes screenshots, downloads files etc.). - he has accounts on Facebook, Skype and email (both Yahoo and Gmail) and knows how to use them most efficiently (sharing large file on Skype when this is not possible via mail, keeping in touch on Facebook Messenger, etc.); - he is aware of the existence of netiquette and tries his best to comply with it, meanwhile being careful not to share personal information; -he is active on an online community (a Minecraft group on Facebook) and shares his experience and achievements on it. - he knows how to take pictures and to record videos; - he currently struggles to record his own tutorials on how to play Minecraft, highquality tutorials done using free, available tools; -later on, he would upload and make public these tutorials on his already existing Youtube channel. - he has already installed antivirus programmes on his tablet and he is quite aware about the danger of stolen identity. - when he needs help, first he asks his father, but he also looks online for information and asks or searches in online communities; - he knows how to install different programmes on the computer or tablet, and currently struggles to learn how to install operating systems, and more complicated software. RO06b8 RO05b7 - he is able to look for information, he actively searches for apps and videos online. 74 | RO07b6 09 February 2016 - he knows how to run different searches, either starting from Google or searching directly in the site in which he is interested (e.g.Lego.com); - he has some critical media literacy knowledge and knows that not all online information is reliable (e.g. he recognises when a special effect is being used in a video). RO08g6 - she runs some searches, especially for videos or apps/ games, with the help of her mother because the girl hasn’t yet learned how to write (and so, the mother types down the search word the girl chooses to use for running the search. - although he is quite familiar with Skype (his family using the application a lot), he doesn’t initiate the conversation on his own; - he is aware about the communicational role of Facebook and knows that it is a platform destined to sharing content and to interacting with people, or even for asking for advice (i.e. community of interests). -she uses her mother’s Facebook account to engage in chats with some friends or relatives, but she also has other activities on her mother’s account (e.g. she likes photos shared by friends, and even posts herself some photos she took); -she is not aware of the existence of some safety rules to communicate online, nor about the netiquette. -he can take photos with his father’s smartphone or even with his father DSLR camera (on auto mode), but does not download the images by himself, nor does any editing on them; - he also used to draw on the computer and he saved some of his creations. - he is not aware of any of the online risks. - although he doesn’t use too much the digital technologies, he has a clear conception of these as problemsolving tools; -he can perform basic operation (open/ close computer, run searches, open the browser etc.) and when he needs some help, he turns toward one of his parents or even grandfather for help. - she can and loves to take photos and she often shares them publicly on her mother’s Facebook account or as an lock-screen on her own devices or in the others’ devices (e.g. she pins a pictures she took on her father’s smartphone). - she doesn’t seem to be aware of the online risks, even though she has a risky online behaviour; - she is not encouraged to care about online privacy, either her own privacy (e.g. she publicly shares her photos), or others’ (she frequently takes others’ devices and alters the owner’s settings). when she needs, she can find support for technical problems at her father or other significant family adult (e.g. her aunt). But usually, if it’s not a major problem, preventing her to accessing the technology, she prefers not to ask for help, but skips the problem (frequently she deletes the apps she doesn’t know to use them); - She can perform almost every basic operational tasks (e.g. installs apps, deletes them, arranges apps on folders etc.), but has some difficulties in using the OSX (AppStore). 75 | RO09b6 09 February 2016 - he can perform some basic searches online (especially for apps in Google play and for videos, starting from the tablet or from the SmartTV); -still, as he doesn’t know how to write, he partially depends on his mother for these searches. - he performs online searches either in browser, when he uses the computer and searches for cartoon or games online), or in Google Play or Google app (on smartphone); RO10b5 - he uses the simplest keywords (e.g. ‘games with cars’); - he and his brother knows about the option to run voicesearching in Google (but the option is limited as they try it in Romanian language) RO11g6 - she can search for games or cartoons in the browser, when she uses the computer and also searches for apps in Google play; -she sometimes manages to retrieve the files (e.g. photos) stored on her tablet and uses them (e.g. to set them as a wallpaper screen). - he knows about the Facebook (from his mother), but he doesn’t know how to use it nor he is interested in it; - he also knows about Skype or Whatsapp, but doesn’t know how to start a conversation by himself or even log on into such an account. - he doesn’t communicate with people online (neither family members, nor friends or colleagues); - he is aware of and knows about Facebook, and sometimes takes a look at his mother’s account without performing any other activity. -she would be able to communicate via Facebook Messenger, if she was allowed to have an account, but for the moment only her older sister has one and she’s not allowed to actively use it (just from time to time to visit it without any other activity). - he can take pictures using his tablets or his smartphone, but his skills stop there (he doesn’t edit them, nor download or save them on other devices). - he is not aware of the online risks and even though his mother insists on the health issues associated with the extensively use of digital technologies, he does not care too much about her worries; - he doesn’t take steps to protect any of his devices. - he can use a range of devices (tablets, smartphone, PSP, Play station, Smart TV) at least at a basic level. Still he has difficulties in using OSX-based devices; - when he needs help he asks one of his parents, but he also started looking at online tutorials in order to learn how to play some games (e.g. Minecraft). - he is the only child in the sample who knows how to use Word app and uses it for fun (creates lists of ‘significant people in his life’); still, he doesn’t save the files he creates; - he is not aware about the online risks, nor about the possible health effect of the excessive use of the internet; - he can perform basic operational tasks (e.g. opens/ closes the computer and the smartphone, downloads / deletes apps), but no more than that; - the boy is careful with the battery life and when he doesn’t use the internet connection, he disables the wifi. - he and his mother tend to consider he is more skilled than he actually is (by compared with his older brother who is not necessarily less skilled, in researcher’s opinion, but rather slower). -he also took pictures with the smartphone, which he doesn’t transfer on the computer, but deletes them when the phone memory is full. -she can take pictures and video records with her tablet; yet, she doesn’t know how to download this content onto the computer. - when he needs support, he asks his mother or learns by trying and error; - she has some knowledge of the online risks (as the computer was once ‘broken’ by viruses) and she would want to set a password for her tablet, but her mother doesn’t allow her; - she knows how to solve routine problems and she always finds support in her sister. -she doesn’t seem to be aware of the health effects that excessive use of the technology could have. 76 | 09 February 2016 4.2. Overall evaluation of Romanian sample As can be observed from the Table 4, at this age looking for information equates with searching for video content or games and apps. All of the children manage to run such searches, sometimes with the assistance of another person, as some of them do not know yet how to write. Regarding communication and collaboration skills, all the children know about the very existence of Facebook (the most common SNS used in Romania), but just a part of them actively engage in communication using Facebook or other platform, and only two of them have their own account (RO06b8 has a Facebook account and RO06b8 and RO02g7 have Skype accounts). Only RO06b8 and partially RO07b6 know about what online collaboration look like, and RO06b8 actively and independently engage in such collaboration. The digital content creation is one of the most important skill an active user should have, and is good to know that all the children from the sample know and love to take pictures and video records. Unfortunately though, their skills in creating content usually stops here, as they don’t edit, store or share (with one exception, RO08g6) their creations. Just one child at this age (RO10b5) knows to use Word-Office app, but he does not save his documents, but rather endlessly creates ‘silly files’. Most of the children have basic operational skills (knowing how to open/shut down the device, how to connect to the internet, to install and delete apps, if they use a mobile device). When they need support, they usually ask one of their parent (not necessary the most skilled, but the nearest one), few of them looking online for support or asking friends. In general children at this age do not have a clear image of the online risks and do not take steps to protect their devices (this is done sometimes by the parent, sometimes by other skilled adult prompt by the parent) or to have a preventive behaviour online. 4.3. Discussion on the appropriateness of DIGCOMP grid for evaluating young children’s digital skills Although it is a very complex grid and well suited for an adult user, the analysis made in this report reveals two main problems in adapting the grid for evaluating young children’s digital skills. The first inadequacy is the totally absence from the grid of some genuine children’s digital activities (as gaming). Moreover, referring to games, there could be imagined several level of proficiency (from the basic distinction between single- versus multi-player (Livingstone et al., 2011), to other typologies (see for example what was being used in Marsh et al., 2015). Still, for appropriating the grid to the young children’s interests, one can question the concept of ‘information’ used in the first three lines of the grid. For children at this age, searching online is mostly looking for games or apps. Should we consider in evaluating their skills games as ‘information’, as most of the time children do not take whatever they find, but do evaluate and discriminate between apps? The grid also seems to make a definitive break between digital skills and (critical) media skills (for an argument for a continuity see Lankshear & Knobel, 2008). In this post 2.0 web, 77 | 09 February 2016 to understand the very nature of the internet (the twofold sides that can intersect: commercial side and user-generated content side) is a digital skill. Moreover, there is a huge literature about the moment in which children can discern between advertising and other kind of content (for a review of it, see the dedicated chapter from Valkenburg, 2004). In this context, evaluating children’s digital skills should probe into his awareness on the commercial nature of the internet. The second kind of deficiency that we noticed was due to the fact that despite the huge differences between children regarding the way they engage with technology, what they can or cannot do, when evaluating their skills based on the grid, the situation seems quite evenly. Thereby, we suggest considering three steps in assessing one’s skills: awareness of the existence of that skill, ‘knowing how to do’ or having the skill at a practical level, and knowing how and what to do and verbalizing around it, which adds the understanding of the activity. A third deficiency observed but on which we won’t elaborate here refers to the more general aspect of the grid that seems to be computer-oriented, neglecting other digital technologies (as mobile, wearable technologies). 78 | 09 February 2016 5. Method 5.1. Procedure 5.1.1. The sampling procedure In selecting the participants several methods were used to achieve the greatest sample diversity. Thus, the researchers used their social networks of friends or neighbours, paying special attention to ensuring diversity to the sample and selecting low socialeconomic status families (for the families: RO1, RO2, RO4 and RO7); they also used the snowball technique (for: RO5 and RO6). The recruitment of all the other families was done through school: a primary school in a small town in the middle of the country for family RO3 and a school in the outskirts of Bucharest for RO8, RO9, RO10, RO11. Thus, one family (RO04) lives in a village (countryside) near Bucharest, four families live on the Nordic outskirts of Bucharest (RO08, RO09, RO10, RO11), three families are from different central parts of Bucharest (RO01, RO06 and RO07), and two families were from a small mountain town (RO02 and RO03). One family is in a hybrid position, living in a new flat on the outskirts of Bucharest, but commuting every day to the centre of the city and practically having every activity of their active life (children and parents alike) there. 5.1.1.1. A few words on the Romanian school system The National Education Bill (No. 1/2011) introduced a few critical changes regarding the beginning of the school for the Romanian children. Thus, the biggest change affecting the kids in our sample was the translation of the preparatory kindergarten class (where it was not compulsory) to the school (compulsory), where it was names ‘clasa zero’ (‘zero grade’), followed by first grade, etc. This was justified by the fact that, as a noncompulsory stage, in poor and rural areas with difficult access, kids got to see a class for the first time in the first grade, and most of the times presented an educational gap towards the rest of the children who attended kindergarten. Thus, starting with 2012, the primary school comprises five years of schooling, from zero to forth grade, and children enrol in school after turning 6. The children who got enrolled in school before and after 2012 present a one-grade delay (as some are in first grade, but in their second year of schooling). In zero grade, kids get acquainted with the letters and learn how to read, but not how to write, which happens, traditionally, in the first grade. In each family, the kid/kids got the JRC’s goodies bag from the researcher. Where the parents proved interested, the researchers offered them copies of other reports (e.g. NCGM) on the subject of children use of the internet. The two schoolmistresses who collaborated with us in the selection stage were awarded an attestation of participation in the project (it specified the activity they were involved in). No family has been awarded money for participating in the project. 79 | 09 February 2016 5.1.2. The sample Family code Member Code Ethnicity Sex Age Year school/ max level of education Profession parents RO1f46 Low – mediumhigh family income Medium** RO01 Romanian M 46 Tertiary RO01 RO01 RO02 RO02 RO02 RO03 RO03 RO03 RO03 RO04 RO04 RO1m45 RO1g6 RO02m27 RO02GM67 RO02g7 RO03f41 RO03m41 RO03gm RO03g7 RO04f30 RO04m28 Medium** Medium** Low** Low** Low** Medium ** Medium** Medium** Low* Low* Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian F F F F F M F F F M F 45 6 27 67 7 41 41 7 30 28 Tertiary 1st Primary Upper secondary Upper secondary 2nd Primary Upper secondary Upper secondary 2nd Primary Lower Secondary Lower Secondary Self employed (Engineer) Philologist RO04 RO04 RO04 RO05 RO05 RO05 RO05 RO06 RO04gm RO04g6 RO04b10 RO05f35 RO05m35 RO05b7 RO05b3 RO06f47 Low* Low* Low* High* High* High* High* Medium* Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian F F M M F M M M 6 10 35 35 7 3 47 Kindergarten 4th primary Tertiary Tertiary 1st primary Kindergarten Tertiary RO06 RO06 RO07 RO06m37 RO06b8 RO07f38 Medium* Medium* Medium* Romanian Romanian Romanian F M M 37 8 38 Tertiary 2nd primary Tertiary RO07 RO07 RO07 RO07 RO07 RO07 RO08 RO08 RO08 RO08 RO08 RO09 RO09 RO09 RO09 RO10 RO10 RO07m38 RO07gm67 RO07gf69 RO07b6 RO07b4 RO07g0 RO08f26 RO08m26 RO08gm43 RO08gf44 RO08g6 RO09f27 RO09m29 RO09b6 RO09g1 RO10m39 RO10gm Medium* Medium* Medium* Medium* Low*/Medium** Low*/Medium** Low*/Medium** Low*/Medium** Low*/Medium** Low*/Medium** Low*/Medium** Low* - Lipoven Lipoven Lipoven Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian F F M M M F M F F M F M F M F F F 38 67 69 6 4 0 26 26 43 44 6 27 29 6 1 39 - Tertiary Kindergarten 2nd kindergarten None Upper secondary Upper secondary Kindergarten Upper secondary Upper secondary None None Upper secondary - Factory worker Retired Salesman Saleswoman Retired Tractor-driver Seasonal work in agriculture Retired Manager Lawyer Self employed (ex-journalist) Housewife University lecturer PR officer Retired Retired Electrician Housewife Electrician Chamber maid Administrator Retired 80 | 09 February 2016 RO10 RO10gf RO10 RO10b5 Low* RO10 RO10b6 Low * RO11 RO11f41 Low * RO11 RO11m37 Low * RO11 RO11g6 Low * RO11 RO11g11 Low * (*) data provided by the family (**) researcher evaluation (***) family self-evaluation (-) lack of information on the topic Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian Romanian M M M M F F F 5 6 41 37 6 11 Kindergarten 1st primary Upper secondary Upper secondary Kindergarten 4th primary Retired Electrician Housekeeper 5.1.3. Implementation of the protocol of observations RO04 RO03 RO02 RO01 Family code One or two parts interview? One part, with the child and the parent interviewed simultaneously by the two researchers Two stages interview: first with the girl and three months later with the mother One part, with the child and the parents interviewed simultaneously by the two researchers One part interview, with the children and the parent interviewed consecutively by the same researcher Who participate d to the interview from the family part? RO01m45 RO01g6 The researcher Anca Velicu-AV; Monica Mitarcă MM AV (talked with RO01g6) MM (talked with RO01m45) Any particular aspect linked with the interview (where the interview took place? If there is a delay in time between child’s and parent’s interview? Etc) Interviewing tools used during the interview No particular aspect except that the child interrupted several times her mother’s interview in the next room with the desire of showing the researcher different toys. - with the child: Activity Book (the mother didn’t want to involved herself in it), cards game, drawing, taking picture by the child - with the mother: word cards - with the child: Activity Book, card games, drawing, taking picture by the child - with the mother: word cards 1st stage: RO02g7 & RO02gm6 7 2nd stage: RO02m27 RO03m41 RO03f41 RO03g7 1ststage: AV 2ndstage: MM The delay between the interviews was due to the fact that the mother was abroad for quite a long period of time. AVwith the girl; MM- with both parents The parents’ interview happened in the girl’s room, while the child’s, in the hallway, where the computer was - with the child: Activity Books, cards game, drawing, taking picture by children - with the mother: word cards RO04m28 RO04g6 RO04b10 AV The mother was present also during the interview with the children, but she was helpful to the researcher. The same for children, who were present during the interview with the mother. The father was also at home, but preferred not to involve himself in the interview - with the child: activity books, cards game, taking picture by children - with the mother: word cards 81 | One part interview, with the children and the parent interviewed consecutively by the same researcher Two stages interview: first with RO6b8, and in another day, next week, with RO6f47 RO05m35 RO05b7 RO05b3 AV RO6f47 RO6b8 AV AV One part interview, with the children and the parents interviewed consecutively by the same researcher RO07f38 RO07m38 RO07b6 RO07b4 RO07g0 AV One part interview, with the child and the parent interviewed consecutively by the same researcher One part interview, with the child and the parent interviewed consecutively by the same researcher RO08m26 RO08g6 AV RO09m29 RO09b6 RO09g1 AV The mother was present also during the interview with the children, but she was helpful to the researcher. The same for children, who were present during the interview with the mother. - with RO6b8: in park, when he came out from school; - with RO6f47: in my office, few days later. This deviation from the protocol was due to the fact that the family (especially the mother) was quite reluctant to let the researcher in their house. So both the interview took place outside their home. RO09 RO08 RO07 RO6 RO05 09 February 2016 In the first part of the interview the researcher was alone with the boys, but with the door open, parents answering in their interview at some of the questions asked to children in the first part. The interview with the parents started with the father and at some points the mother joined us with precious information. The mother was present also during the interview with the child, but she was helpful to the researcher. The same for the child, who was present during the interview with the mother. The mother was present also during the interview with the children, being split between the interview and the little girl who asked for all her attention. The boy was also present during the interview with the mother, but was totally absorbed by watching something at TV. - with the child: Activity Book (very little involvement from boys’ part), cards game, taking picture by RO05b7 The observation part was totally absent in the child interview. In compensation, both interviews were quite long and informative, more than one hour and a half each. There were not used any tools during the interview, as both, the boy and the father were talkative and not too keen in playing ‘childish’ game. - with the children: activity book (little involvement from boys’ part), cards game, taking picture by both boys. - with the child: Activity Book (little involvement from girl’s part), cards game, taking picture by the girl. - with the child: Activity Book (little involvement from the boy’s part), cards game. 82 | One part interview, with the children and the parent interviewed consecutively by the same researcher One part interview, with the child and the parents interviewed consecutively by the same researcher RO10m39 RO10b5 RO10b6 AV RO11m37 RO11f41 RO11g6 AV RO11 RO10 09 February 2016 The mother was present also during the interview with the children, but she was helpful to the researcher. The same for children, who were present during the interview with the mother. The mother was also present during the interview with the child, but she was helpful for the researcher. The child left the room after the interview and played in another room. The father came home during the interview and took part in it for around 10 minutes and then he left the room. - with the children: Activity Book (little involvement from the boys’ part), cards game. - with the child: Activity Book (the mother didn’t want to get involve in it), card games, taking picture by the child; - with the mother: word cards In none of the families the researchers did the digital tour of the house as a method of information gathering – for two reasons. On one hand, traditionally, in the Romanian house there’s a delimitation between the more ‘public’ areas (sometimes called, the ‘big house’ or the ‘guests’ zone’, the ‘front’ rooms or the museum-like rooms) and the ‘private’ areas of the house, where the less known visitors do not have access, since these are the premises where the members of the household spend their daily lives. Even if that separation sort of lost its power once with living in the city, in a blockhouse, we did not wanted to put the parent in an awkward situation, should the child wanted to take a tour, and the parent would have proved reluctant. On the other hand, during communism the national security services were spying on a good part of the population with the help of neighbour and friends (as many citizens were collaborators of the former Securitate and provided written memos on their close circle of neighbours and friends). Thus there’s a great reluctance on the part of Romanians towards people asking them question, be them researchers – especially if they ask about the household items and goods which can be seen as ‘family investment’. In order to avoid all these suspicions, the researchers decided among themselves not to use this tool, but to collect information via other methods. Another tool which was not used in the Romanian sample families was the ‘ICT chart’. Although the researchers recognize its usefulness, with few exceptions they had to deal with a time pressure from the parents’ part and so it was opted for a data gathering via specific questions and answers where these answers did not appear spontaneously in the parents’ or children’ discourse. 5.1.4. Recording In all the families they’ve been, the researchers had digital sound recorders with them and at least one digital camera; at the first family, a photo camera, in the others, they gave up the camera in favour of the researcher’s tablet (an iPad mini). The use of that has been an ad hoc decision for family RO02; at the moment of the interview, in the house there wasn’t any functional touch screen device, but the researchers’ wanted to test, nevertheless, the digital 83 | 09 February 2016 competencies of RO02g6 in using such a device; it seemed like a good solution to use the iPad in all the other families. The field notes were also recorded audio after leaving the field. 5.1.5. Implementation of the protocol of analysis All the interviews were completely transcribed and then coded and analyzed in NVivo. Some families had two Word documents attached (the child’s interview being taken separately than the parent/s’ interview, when they were both presents and interfered in the discussion (RO03, RO07, RO11), while other families had only one document, as the transition from interviewing the child / children to the parent/s were smooth and imperceptible. 5.2. Discussion 5.2.1. Why might the results have turned out that way? An important element influencing the research results was the data gathering moment. Thus, the first three interviews were taken in the last school week-first vacation week; the fourth interview took place in the middle of the summer vacation and the rest of them, at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year (the first month). Data showed there were major differences in the use of digital technologies during vacation and during school time, as children tended to relate to the previous (school) period, not to the time being. The children in the last four interviews did not have a previous school experience. So taking into account both periods and repeated visits (at least twice) of the researcher is desirable, in order to overcome this shortcoming. Repeated visits would have helped, also, to partially catch the dynamics of learning and of using media technologies, which has only been sensed by the researchers in the current study. 5.2.2. In what way did the findings changed over time? In Romania, as far as we know, there are no data on the use of mobile technologies for children under the age of eight. On the other hand, within the international researches studying the use of technologies by the children 9 to 16 years old (e.g. the EU Kids Online Project and the Net Children Go Mobile Project), Romania has revealed a pretty specific profile, with a delay in adopting mobile devices (see Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2014), with a weak parental mediation and with a weak awareness by parents of their kids’ digital activities; moreover, with low youth digital competencies (Livingstone et al., 2011). Our research on the use of digital technologies by the children 0 to 8 years old does not change much this general picture. 84 | 09 February 2016 Although tablets and smart phones entered the daily lives of many families, they are still seen as useless and/or too expensive devices; thus, parents are reluctant in acquiring them. Smart toys or smart TVs are still quasi-absent from the Romanian families/households. For a series of reasons we shall list below, the general picture of parental mediation looks better than in the previous researches’ results, (Mascheroni & Olafsson, 2014, Haddon & Vincent, 2014, Smahel & Wright, 2014, Livingstone et al, 2011), as almost all the parents are involved, one way or the other, in the children’ digital lives – and not only in a restrictive manner. The contributing factors/reasons are: 1). Until the age of 8, children need a more careful supervision from the parent than 9-16 year old kids, and, as such, the parent is more present, including in the child’s digital world; 2). As an extension of the previous factor and given the poor organization of the kindergarten system in Romania, many parents spend a great deal of time with the kids – the big majority only attend the four hour program (from 8 AM till noon), and there are cases of children who do not attend it at all; 3). There is a decrease in the intergenerational gap in media use, as we studied here younger parents who grew up at least with the computer. Still, the parental mediation the Romanian sample children enjoy is far from being ‘perfect’, only in a few families the parent moved from the operational competencies and tried to teach the child critical media literacy, information literacy etc. Even if the Net Children Go Mobile research has been showing a rather good intertwining of technology and school (Mascheroni & Olaffson, 2014), that was rather in the logic of compensating the lack of traditional educational resources (books, dictionaries), since the online environment is seen only as the digital version of books, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, sometimes even in the form of pictures or the .pdf version of paper books (Velicu et al., 2014, Haddon & Vincent, 2014). We can also find this overall picture of the online in the data gathered for this research and, given the fact that, at 8, reading is not a something children know how to do, the internet is considered as still non-necessary for school at this age, neither the parents, nor the teachers would encourage children to use it for school-related purposes. 5.2.3. How could the study be improved? The size of the sample (around 10) seems to be well fitted for an exploratory qualitative study. Still, in order to get a clearer picture of the phenomenon, a quantitative study based on the results of the exploratory stage is a must. As said before, a repeated visit to each family could improve both the quality and the quantity of the data. As many parents post on SNS different comments and pictures of the child, including his/hers digital life, between the two visits one could imagine a netnographic research on the parents’ SNS accounts, by taking them as partners. 85 | 09 February 2016 6. Conclusions 6.1. Key findings 6.1.1. Children’s engagement with digital technology The Romanian households are in their majority still in the computer-era (desktop or laptop), with just one family in the sample giving up the computer when broken, and replacing it with tablets, smartphones and smart TV. • Still, if given an alternative, kids prefer to migrate on mobile devices, with the tablet as the most used and present gadget, seen by the children as more accessible, in terms of the competences required, as well as in terms of mobility. • While the TV set accompanies children in their daily routine, the PSP, Play station or the Wii are less present in Romania. • Video gaming seems to be the activity all the children five to eight have in common. There are neutral and universal games – played by girls and boys alike (e.g. escape and obstacles games) – and those that get to be stereotyped as ‘girlie games’ (cooking, style, creation) or ‘boys’ games’ (fights, cars, football – GTA, FIFA) – which are being played accordingly. • Kids do watch online videos: at younger ages, YouTube functions as an extension or alternative to the cartoon channels on TV, whereas at an older age, kids discover the user generated content (vlogs, tutorials etc.). Some kids are actively searching for promotional videos for their favorite toys and enjoy watching them. • Content creation: All the children in the Romanian sample know how and love to take pictures and videos; some of them also use drawing and painting apps. • Some of the children in the Romanian sample use digital technology in order to engage in communication. This kind of engagement is especially important for children whose parents are abroad for work (a frequent situation in Romania). • 6.1.2. Perceptions and attitudes • Most of the Romanian parents consider the smartphone as a yet not necessary device for children at this age. Paradoxically, when the child gets older and receives a smartphone this will give the parents a feeling of safety (due to the permanent contact with the kid), but at this age, the presence of the smartphone turns out to be seen by parents as an element of insecurity, leaving the child exposed to possible acts of robbery. • For children, there is a desire of owning technology in itself, in an endless accumulation of devices into some panoply of the toys the child already owns. • For the parents, most of the time the acquisition of technological devices is a costdriven one, governed the rule ‘the cheaper, the better.’ • Parents see the digital technologies as a positive thing, giving their children some opportunities (e.g. entertainment and information) and helping them in parenting (i.e. baby-sitter type of use of technology). It often happens that the family gathers around technology for shared activities (e.g. playing games). 86 | 09 February 2016 • • • • • Both the parents and the children in the Romanian sample tend to consider as ‘technology’ and thus worthy to invest in, only the devices themselves; content and software are seen as collateral elements one takes ‘for free’ from the internet. The interviewed parents think the educational opportunities of digital technology are not available for 6 to 8 year-old children, which are seen as either too young for the informational side of the internet, as they don’t know yet how to read, or as too old for the educational apps that, children and parents alike, see as boring. Some parents acknowledge the influence of the educational apps or websites over their children’s learning of English, regretting the lack of interesting educational content in Romanian. Parents list some worries – excessive use, inadequate content (violence and sexuality) and health concerns – that they link with digital technology; in fact they are not specific to digital technologies, but translated from the older media. With few exceptions, these concerns are seen either as future threats, or under control due to the fact the child internalizes the rules and self-regulates his/her activities – or as a possibility parents try hard to avoid, or, lastly, as a risk for ‘other’ families and ‘other’ children, not their own. 6.1.3. Parental mediation • • • • Beyond the universal rule ‘no paid applications,’ there are other rules enforced by parents as part of their mediation: time of use rule, content rule, contact rule (for the kids who already have an account on a social media/communication platform). Time of use rule: there’s a difference between children 5 to 6 and those 7 to 8 years old, as the latter have started having homework to do and less spare time. The majority of the parents in the sample are involved in some forms of active mediation of their child’s digital life. There are three stages of mediation, not all of them present in all the families: once the device enters the family, the initial operational skills are learnt by the child from the parents in an overt learning session, at the parent’s initiative; alternatively, if the child ‘is born with that technology in the house’, he or she usually learns mainly by observation, watching how the adults use it. In the second stage of parental active mediation, the child asks for advice and help in punctual situations involving the use of digital technology in which he or she needs to be helped. If the parents are skilled enough and have the answers for the child’s questions, this stage could be pretty extensive in time, the child tending to squeeze out as much knowledge on that technology as possible from the parent(s); if not, the child will turn his back from the parent and rely on peers or other adults when available, or on his- or herself, learning by trial and error. The third stage is even less frequent and appears once the parent, who has a good knowledge and critical understanding in digital technology, wants to enlarge the child’s view of the internet or to teach the child how to use it more efficiently. In order to do so, the parent will actively teach the child all sorts of things (sometimes abstract or general, mostly critical) not necessarily operational, as in the first stage, and not at the child’s initiative, as in the second stage. Many parents control or supervise their child’s digital activity: some of them practice an unobtrusive mediation, from the shadows, which would give children some safe space – while others are much more intrusive, paying no respect to the private space of the child – on the tablet, in this case. 87 | 09 February 2016 • • For some parents, there is a tension between the use by the child of the mobile devices perceived as ‘personal’ (and, thus, part of the child’s private space) and, on the other hand, the desire of being a ‘good parent’, in control of the child’s online life, and the desire of showing this. Most of the parents are not aware of the parental control options available on fixed or mobile devices; also, most of the parents admit having used the digital technologies in a punishment/reward system. 6.1.4. Digital skills • • • • • • Most of the children have basic operational skills (knowing how to open/shut down the device, how to connect to the internet, to install and delete apps, if they use a mobile device). When they need support, they usually ask one of their parent (not necessary the most skilled), few of them looking online for support or asking friends. In general children do not have at this age a clear image of the online risks and do not take steps to protect their devices or to have a preventive behaviour online. All the children know and love to take pictures and video records, but their skills in creating content usually stops here. All the children know about the very existence of Facebook (the most common SNS used in Romania), but just a part of them actively engage in communication using Facebook or other platform, and only two of them have their own account (one has a Facebook account and both have a Skype account). Looking for information at this age equates with searching for video content or games and apps. All of them manage to run such searches, sometimes with the assistance of another person, as some of them do not know yet how to write. 6.2. Recommendations Some of the results of the research urge for stakeholder intervention in order to address the current situation. We shall list below some tangible solutions for some of the problem solutions which can be undertaken by policy-makers or by industry, whereas in other cases (for parents, for example), we would only suggest a better approach. 6.2.1. Recommendations to Policy-makers • • Problem: there is an acute lack of educational content in Romanian, situation which discourages children and parents alike to perceive and use the digital technology for educational purposes. Solution: it could be an active encouragement for the development of such content. How: For example, using the model of stimulating the creation of audiovisual content in the national languages there could be a similar stimulation of educational content created in the national languages either by financial stipends or by an imposed fixed quota of national language content for local software developers. Another idea could be for the Ministry of Education to sustain by national competition the development of such content in an Opens Sources System. Problem: there is a lack of awareness from parent’s part regarding the risks of digital technology for children this age – parents tending either to postpone the 88 | 09 February 2016 • worries for an older age or to eagerly translate older media worries to these new online technology –misconception which impedes also on the opportunities that digital technology use could have for young children. Solution: there is a need for correctly informing parents on both, risks and opportunities that digital media can have for young children. How: one could imagine a media campaign to inform parents on the issue, campaign sustained by public and commercial media pro bono. An alternative or complementary solution would be to run an informative campaign for parents through schools or kindergarten (sometimes such informative sessions are already in place, but they target the parents of older children). Problem: All children at this age and most of their parents consider digital technology only as an entertainment tool for children under 8 year-old. Also, none of the interviewed children does use the digital technology for school, as teachers never advice them to do so or encourage them in that direction. Thus for children at the age of 6 to 8, there seems to be two totally separate worlds: school-world and digitalworld. Moreover, some parents said that in schools or kindergarten there aren’t any (functional) digital devices that could be used in educational process. Solution: there is a need for a coherent effort to ensure the presence of such devices, as well as the content and the teachers’ prep, in order to introduce digital technologies in kindergartens and schools, from the youngest age. An important goal is the change of perception regarding technologies, so they get to be considered an educational tool and not only an entertainment tool. How: in Romania, there are already programs for endowing schools with digital technology. These programs should be extended for kindergarten and also should be extended to keep updating the technology (for example, there are not systematic programs which aim to bring mobile technology in school, most projects having stopped at desktop computers). An increase in the digital literacy is also needed (including informational literacy, critical media literacy etc.) for teachers, parents and children alike. 6.2.2. Recommendations to Industries • • Problem: Most of the parents do not know about the existence of parental control solution, for computers or for mobile devices. Solution: the industry could actively contribute to an increase of parental awareness of the possible solutions for protecting the children. How: the industry producing security software which include parental control options could have more visible informative campaign aiming to promote these solutions. Another possible solution could be to set the device on a safety profile designed for the use of a child, from the stage of the initialization of the device (when one chooses the basic features of the device, as is the language or the time, to have the possibility to choose child-profile). Problem: many parents and children denounce the lack of educational content adequate to this age (there are all too childish or too difficult). Solution: a more informed perception of the industry regarding what exactly children at this age do use and how they do engage with technology could be beneficial. How: mutually advantageous partnership between industry and researchers (as it is already in place in other countries) could be a viable solution for this problem. 6.2.3. Recommendations to Parents and Carers 89 | 09 February 2016 • • We recommend the parents to be aware that for children, as important as a good device is a quality content. Thus, in order to offer the child the benefits of online technology, parents have to be more willing to invest money and time in an active search of such content. We observed that parents tend to consider their role in active mediation stops once the child acquires operational competencies, after which they can withdraw in a restrictive mediation role that counterbalances the first step they made towards technology (often times seen as a Pandora box). We recommend parents to reconsider their role in active mediation as extending through the entire childhood, and to understand they should accompany their child in all their digital life as children. 6.2.4. Recommendations to School, Libraries, Museums • • At this age, there is a total lack of the risks awareness from the children’s part regarding online technology. There should be introduced in schools and in kindergartens e-safety courses, with content that fits both children’s cognitive development and children’s use of technology. These courses should educate children on the possible risks of the digital technologies and on the possible prevention methods. This sort of information already exists and proved to be very efficient especially in the disadvantaged areas, where the parents are not using these technologies, or have low digital competencies, but usually is destined to older children. Children 5 to 8 should also be included as targets of such campaigns. As the school is totally separated in children’s and parents’ perceptions from the children’s digital world, the same happens with other cultural institutions as libraries or museums, which are an obsolete and not so informative world, as a father said. In Romania at least, these institutions are not at all friendly to our digital kids. It is advisable the situation changes and museums and libraries to start considering younger children as one of their key-target and offer them digital information in a suitable form, adapted to their cognitive development and their interests. Libraries and museum should consider reducing costs by only offering the content that can be read by the child using his or her own device. 6.2.5. Proposal of further research • • Given the rapid evolution, at this age, of both the way children engage with technology (from the devices or the apps they use, to the kind of activities), and the skills acquired, a longitudinal approach of research is recommended, with at least two visits of the researchers at the respondents’ home, at a certain time interval. It would also be helpful that the qualitative research data could be tested in a quantitative research that would show the spread of the phenomena in the population. 90 | 09 February 2016 7. References Blumler, J. g. & McQuail, D. (1968). Television in Politics: Its Uses and Influence. London: Faber and Faber. Chaudron, S. et al. (2015). Young Children (0-8) and Digital Technology (No. EUR 27052 EN) (pp. 1–528). Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Duerager, A., & Livingstone, S. (2012). How can parents support children’s internet safety? LSE, London: EU Kids Online Network. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books. Haddon, L. (2006). The contribution of domestication research to In-home computing and media consumption. The information Society, 22, 195- 203. Helsper, E. J., Kalmus, V., Hasebrink, U., Sagvari, B., & de Haan, J. (2013). Country classification: Opportunities, risks, harm and parental mediation. EU Kids Online, The London School of Economics and Political Science. Holloway,D., Green, L. and Livingstone, S. (2013). Zero to eight. Young children and their internet use. LSE, London: EU Kids Online. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers. Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York & London: Routledge. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2008). Digital Literacies. Peter Lang. Livingstone, S., Mascheroni, G., Dreier, M., & Chaudron, S. (2015). How parents of young children manage digital devices at home: the role of income, education and parental style. London: EU Kids Online, LSE. Livingstone, S. M., Haddon, L., Görzig, A., & Ólafsson, K. (2011). Risk and Safety on the Internet. London: London School of Economics. Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2013). Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2), 169–187. http://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912452486. Marsh, J., Plowman, L., Yamada-Rice, D., Bishop, J. C., Lahmar, J., Scott, F., et al. (2015). Exploring Play and Creativity in Pre-Schoolers’ Use of Apps (pp. 1–203). Retrieved from http://www.techandplay.org. Mascheroni, G., & Ólafsson, K. (2014). Net opportunities (Second Edition). Milano: Educatt. children go mobile: risks and Perloff, R. M. (1993). Third-person effect research, 1983-992: A review and Synthesis. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 5, 167-184. Siverstone, R., & Haddon, L. (1996). Design and the domestication of information and communication technologies: Technical change and everyday life. In R. Siverstone & R. Mansell (Eds.), Communication by design: The politics of information and communication technologies (pp. 44-74). Oxford, UK: Oxford university press. Smahel, D., & Wright, M. F. (Eds.). (2014). The meaning of online problematic situations for children (pp. 1–171). London: EU kids Online, London School of Economics and Political Science. 91 | 09 February 2016 Valkenburg, P. M. (2004). Children's Responses to the Screen: A Media Psychological Approach (Routledge Communication Series). Mahwah & London: Routledge. Vancea, M., & Olivera, N. (2013). E-migrant Women in Catalonia: Mobile Phone Use and Maintenance of Family Relationships. Gender, Technology and Development, 17(2), 179–203. http://doi.org/10.1177/0971852413488715. Velicu, A., Mascheroni, G. și Ólafsson, K. (2014). Riscuri și oportunități în folosirea internetului mobil de către copiii din România. Raportul proiectului Net Children Go Mobile. București: Ars Docendi. Toth, G., Toth, A., Voicu, O, Ştefănescu, M (2007). Efectele migratiei: copiii ramasi acasa. Raport FSR. Bucuresti. 92 | 09 February 2016 8. Annexes 8.1. Annex DIGCOMP framework Basic user Independent user Proficient user 1IU I can use advanced search strategies I can use different search engines to find (e.g. using search operators) to find information. I use some filters when reliable information on the internet. I searching (e.g. searching only images, can use web feeds (like RSS) to be videos, maps). updated with content I am interested in. 2BU 2IU I can assess the validity and credibility of information using a range of criteria. I am I compare different sources to assess aware of new advances in information the reliability of the information I find. search, storage and retrieval. 1BU I can look for information online using a search engine. I know not all online information is reliable. I can save or store files or content 3 BU I classify the information in a methodical 3IU I can save information found on the (e.g. text, pictures, music, videos, way using files and folders to locate these internet in different formats. I can use web pages) and retrieve them once easier. I do backups of information or files cloud information storage services. saved or stored. I have stored. I can communicate with others using 4 BU 4IU mobile phone, Voice over IP (e.g. I actively use a wide range of I can use advanced features of several Skype) e-mail or chat – using basic communication tools (e-mail, chat, SMS, communication tools (e.g. using Voice features (e.g. voice messaging, instant messaging, blogs, micro-blogs, over IP and sharing files). SMS, send and receive e-mails, text social networks) for online communication. exchange). 5 BU I can use collaboration tools and contribute to e.g. shared documents/files someone else has created. I can share files and content using simple tools. I know I can use digital technologies 6 BU I can use some features of online to interact with services (as services (e.g. public services, e-banking, governments, banks, hospitals). online shopping). 7 BU I am aware of social networking sites and online collaboration tools. I am aware that when using digital 8 BU tools, certain communication rules apply (e.g. when commenting, sharing personal information). 9 BU I can produce simple digital content (e.g. text, tables, images, audio files) in at least one format using digital tools. I can make basic editing to content produced by others. I pass on or share knowledge with others online (e.g. through social networking tools or in online communities). 1PU 2PU 3PU 4PU 5IU I can create and manage content with collaboration tools (e.g. electronic calendars, project management systems, online proofing, online spreadsheets). 6IU I actively participate in online spaces and use several online services (e.g. public services, e-banking, online shopping). 5PU 7IU 7PU I can use advanced features of communication tools (e.g. video conferencing, data sharing, application sharing). 8IU 6PU 8PU I am aware of and use the rules of online communication ("netiquette"). I can produce complex digital content in different formats (e.g. text, tables, images, audio files). I can use tools/editors for creating web page or blog using templates (e.g. WordPress). 9IU 10 BU I can apply basic formatting (e.g. insert 10IU footnotes, charts, tables) to the content I or others have produced. I can produce or modify complex, multimedia content in different formats, using a variety of digital platforms, tools and environments. I can create a website using a programming language. 93 | 9PU 10PU 09 February 2016 11BU I know that content can be covered by copyright. I know how to reference and reuse content covered by copyright. I can apply and modify simple 12 BU functions and settings of software and I know the basics of one programming applications that I use (e.g. change language. default settings). 13 BU 11IU I can use advanced formatting functions of 11PU different tools (e.g. mail merge, merging documents of different formats, using advanced formulas, macros). 12IU 12PU I know how to apply licences and copyrights. 13IU I can use several programming languages. 13PU I know how to design, create and modify databases with a computer tool. I can take basic steps to protect my 14 BU I have installed security programmes on 14IU I frequently check the security the device(s) that I use to access the devices (e.g. using anti-viruses and configuration and systems of my devices Internet (e.g. antivirus, firewall). I run passwords). I know that not all and/or of the applications I use. these programmes on a regular basis and online information is reliable. I update them regularly. I am aware that my credentials 15 BU 15IU I use different passwords to access (username and password) can be I know how to react if my computer is equipment, devices and digital services stolen. I know I should not reveal infected by a virus. and I modify them on a periodic basis. private information online. 14PU 16IU I can configure or modify the firewall and I know that using digital technology 16 BU I can identify the websites or e-mail messages which might be used to scam. too extensively can affect my health. security settings of my digital devices. I can identify a phishing e-mail. I take basic measures to save 17 BU I can shape my online digital identity and 17IU I know how to encrypt e-mails or files. energy. keep track of my digital footprint. 18 BU I understand the health risks associated 18IU with the use of digital technology (e.g. I can apply filters to spam e-mails. ergonomy, risk of addiction). 16PU 19 BU 20 BU I understand the positive and negative impact of technology on the environment. 19IU To avoid health problems (physical and psychological), I make reasonable use of information and communication technology. 15PU 17PU 18PU 19PU 20IU I have an informed stance on the impact of 20PU digital technologies on everyday life, online consumption, and the environment. I can find support and assistance 21 BU 21IU 21PU I can solve most of the more frequent I can solve almost all problems that arise when a technical problem occurs or problems that arise when using digital when using digital technology. when using a new device, program technologies. or application. I know how to solve some routine 22 BU I can use digital technologies to solve 22IU 22PU I can choose the right tool, device, problems (e.g. close program, re(non-technical) problems. I can select a application, software or service to solve start computer, re-install/update digital tool that suits my needs and (non-technical) problems. program, check internet connection). assess its effectiveness. I know that digital tools can help me 23 BU I can solve technological problems by 23IU I am aware of new technological 23PU in solving problems. I am also aware exploring the settings and options of developments. I understand how new tools that they have their limitations. programmes or tools. work. When confronted with a 24 BU 24IU technological or non-technological I regularly update my digital skills. I am I frequently update my digital skills. problem, I can use the digital tools I aware of my limits and try to fill my gaps. know to solve it. 94 | 24PU 09 February 2016 I am aware that I need to update my 25 BU digital skills regularly. 25IU 25PU 8.2. DIGCOMP filled in for each family in Romanian sample RO_01g6 searching for information communication & collaboration content creation Basic user 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU DK 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU NTY 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU DK 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU YES** 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU DK 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13IU NTY 13PU 13 BU communication & collaboration content creation 8PU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU NTY 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU YES* 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU YES*** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES* 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU NTY 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user RO_02g7 searching for information Proficient user DK safety skills problem solving Independent user 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user YES** 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU YES** 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU DK 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU YES** 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU DK NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU YES** 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** NTY 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU 8PU 95 | 09 February 2016 NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13IU NTY 13PU 13 BU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU YES** 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU YES** NTY 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU YES** 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU YES** 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU safety skills problem solving YES** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU YES** 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY RO_03g7 searching for information communication & collaboration content creation RO_04g6 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user YES** 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU DK 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU YES** 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU DK 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU NTY 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13IU NTY 13PU 13 BU 8PU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU YES** 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU YES** 17 BU 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY YES** 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU safety skills problem solving 25 BU Basic user YES** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU NTY 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user 96 | 09 February 2016 searching for information communication & collaboration content creation YES** 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU NTY 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU YES** 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU NTY 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU NTY 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13IU NTY 13PU 13 BU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU NTY 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU NTY 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU safety skills problem solving YES** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU NTY 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user RO_05b7 searching for information communication & collaboration content creation safety skills 8PU 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user YES** 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU NTY 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU NTY 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU NTY 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU NTY 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13 BU 13IU NTY 13PU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU NTY 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU 8PU 97 | 09 February 2016 NTY 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU problem solving YES** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU NTY 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user RO_06b8 searching for information communication & collaboration content creation communication & collaboration Proficient user 1BU YES** 1IU YES** 1PU YES** 2BU DK 2IU NTY 2PU YES** 3 BU YES** 3IU NTY 3PU YES** 4 BU YES** 4IU YES** 4PU YES** 5 BU YES** 5IU NTY 5PU DK 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU YES** 7IU YES** 7PU YES** 8 BU YES** 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU DK 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU YES** 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU YES** 12 BU DK 12IU NTY 12PU 13 BU 8PU 13IU NTY 13PU YES** 14 BU YES** 14IU YES** 14PU YES** 15 BU YES** 15IU NTY 15PU YES** 16 BU NTY 16IU YES** 16PU YES** 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU YES** 18IU DK 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU DK 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU YES** 21 BU YES** 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU YES** 22IU NTY 22PU YES** 23 BU YES** 23IU NTY 23PU YES** 24 BU YES** 24IU NTY 24PU YES** 25 BU Basic user RO_07b6 searching for information Independent user 25PU YES** safety skills problem solving 25IU 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user YES** 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU YES** 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU NTY 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU 98 | 09 February 2016 content creation YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU NTY 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13 BU 13IU NTY 13PU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU DK 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU NTY 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU safety skills problem solving communication & collaboration content creation 8PU 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU YES** 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user YES** 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU NTY 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU YES** 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU YES** 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU NTY 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU NTY 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13IU NTY 13PU 13 BU 8PU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU NTY 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU NTY 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU safety skills problem solving 7PU YES** RO_08g6 searching for information NTY YES** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU 99 | 09 February 2016 NTY 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user RO_09b6 searching for information communication & collaboration content creation communication & collaboration content creation Proficient user 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU NTY 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU NTY 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU NTY 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU NTY 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13IU NTY 13PU 13 BU 8PU NTY 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU NTY 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU NTY 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU YES** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU NTY 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user RO_10b5 searching for information Independent user 25PU YES** safety skills problem solving 25IU 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user YES** NTY 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU NTY 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU NTY 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU YES** NTY 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU 8 BU NTY 8IU 8PU YES** NTY 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 100 | 09 February 2016 13 BU communication & collaboration content creation NTY 14IU NTY 14PU NTY 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU NTY 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU YES** 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU YES* 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** NTY 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU Basic user 25IU Independent user 25PU Proficient user YES** 1BU NTY 1IU NTY 1PU NTY 2BU NTY 2IU NTY 2PU YES** 3 BU NTY 3IU NTY 3PU YES** 4 BU NTY 4IU NTY 4PU NTY 5 BU NTY 5IU NTY 5PU NTY 6 BU NTY 6IU NTY 6PU NTY 7 BU NTY 7IU NTY 7PU DK 8 BU NTY 8IU YES** 9 BU NTY 9IU NTY 9PU NTY 10 BU NTY 10IU NTY 10PU NTY 11BU NTY 11IU NTY 11PU NTY 12 BU NTY 12IU NTY 12PU 13IU NTY 13PU 13 BU 8PU YES** 14 BU NTY 14IU NTY 14PU DK 15 BU NTY 15IU NTY 15PU DK 16 BU NTY 16IU NTY 16PU DK 17 BU NTY 17IU NTY 17PU 18 BU NTY 18IU NTY 18PU 19 BU NTY 19IU NTY 19PU 20IU NTY 20PU 20 BU safety skills problem solving 13PU 14 BU RO_11g6 searching for information NTY NTY safety skills problem solving 13IU YES** 21 BU NTY 21IU NTY 21PU YES** 22 BU NTY 22IU NTY 22PU NTY 23 BU NTY 23IU NTY 23PU NTY 24 BU NTY 24IU NTY 24PU NTY 25 BU 25IU 25PU DK- don't know 101 | 09 February 2016 NTY- 'not there yet': the child doesn't have that skill yet YES*- the child has that skill as observed during the interview YES**-the child has that skill according to her/his self-evaluation or as reported by other family member YES***-the child has that skill according to researcher's evaluation 102 |