Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 The problem of media and generations -- 2 Age, cohort, life course and generation -- 3 Generation as location: Media landscapes and generations -- 4 Generation as actuality: Subjective landscapes of media generations -- 5 Nostalgia and the process of generationing -- 6 Generation, mediatisation and the rhythm of ages -- References -- Index.

Computer games, the Internet, and other new communications media are often seen to pose threats and dangers to young people, but they also provide new opportunities for creativity and self-determination. As we start to look beyond the immediate hopes and fears that new technologies often provoke, there is a growing need for in-depth empirical research. Digital Generations presents a range of exciting and challenging new work on children, young people, and new digital media. The book is organized around four key themes: Play and Gaming, The Internet, Identities and Communities Online, and Learning and Education. The book brings together researchers from a range of academic disciplines – including media and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology and education – and will be of interest to a wide readership of researchers, students, practitioners in digital media, and educators.

While the analysis of generations has been central in the sociological understanding of social change, the role of the media in this process has only been acknowledged as an important feature during the last couple of decades. Building on quantitative and qualitative comparative research, Media Generations analyses the role of the media in the formation of generational experience, identity and habitus, and how mediated nostalgia is an important part in the social formation of generations. Avoiding popular generational labelling Göran Bolin argues that the totality of the media landscape is a contextual structure that together with age and life-course factors help inform world-views and ways to relate to the wider society that guide the actions of media users. Media Generations demonstrates how - as different generations come of age at different moments in the mediatised historical process - they develop different media habits, but also make sense of the world differently, which informs their relations to older and younger generations. It also explores how this process of ‘generationing’, that is, the process in which a generation come into being as a self-perceived social identity, partly builds on specific kinds of nostalgia that establishes generational differences and distinctions. This book will be of special interest to those studying social change, collective memory, cultural identity and the role of the media in social experience.

It is self-evident that media planning and buying cannot continue to use the methods, systems and technologies that were developed in the 1970's and 1980's. While they are comfortable and are the current currency in media allocation they are as obsolete as carbon paper. Most media planners and buyers are acting as agents for their clients. Thus, they have a fiduciary obligation to allocate the finite corporate resources in the most effective and efficient manner possible. For the client/advertiser that charge now includes an objective to become more consumer-centric and increase marketing ROI. The new SIMM consumer allocation method does just that by making the consumer and their consumption value, and media influences to purchase key elements in the new model. Media Generations also demonstrates the utility to media planning of considering how media consumption and influence change among age cohorts with different media experiences.

Computer games, the Internet, and other new communications media are often seen to pose threats and dangers to young people, but they also provide new opportunities for creativity and self-determination. As we start to look beyond the immediate hopes and fears that new technologies often provoke, there is a growing need for in-depth empirical research. Digital Generations presents a range of exciting and challenging new work on children, young people, and new digital media. The book is organized around four key themes: Play and Gaming, The Internet, Identities and Communities Online, and Learning and Education. The book brings together researchers from a range of academic disciplines – including media and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology and education – and will be of interest to a wide readership of researchers, students, practitioners in digital media, and educators.

This book builds on existing conversations surrounding millennials and media use by examining Generation Z’s engagement with new media technologies and comparing it to that of millennials. Ahmet Atay and Mary Z. Ashlock have assembled this edited volume in which contributors focus on three interrelated areas: how millennials and Gen Z use new media technologies and platforms in different contexts; how they use media and what they do with it; and the relationship between the two generations and the media as media outlets attempt to use millennials and Gen Z as their targeted audience group. Through close analysis and comparison, this volume generates a richer discussion about the cultures of millennials and Gen Z and their complex relationship with media texts and platforms. Scholars of media studies, technology studies, communication, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

There is currently much discourse about generations in the public sphere. A sequence of letters conflates generations and age cohorts born in the last few decades (generation “X”, “Y” or “Z”) as well as multiple categories are used to describe today’s young people as a generation that is distinct from its predecessors. Despite the popularity of generational labels in media, politics, or even academia, the use of generation as a conceptual tool in youth studies has been controversial. This Special Issue allows readers to better understand the key issues regarding the use of generation as a theoretical concept and/or as a social category in the field of youth studies, shedding light on the controversies, trends, and cautions that go through it.