Portugal: main findings

The Portuguese teenagers are mostly consumers, feeling very comfortable in this role and, in some cases, showing very interesting levels of critical understanding. Traditionally, critical understanding is the cornerstone of media literacy (^{Potter, 2010}). However, nowadays one would expect teens to also be regular producers of media contents and engaged participants in public digital and online spaces. That is not the Portuguese case. Among the 78 teens, very few used to create regularly and in a structured way, producing with some kind of an authorial dimension, going beyond unedited and automatic creations or interactions with their everyday social circle. Considering production and participation practices and attitudes, the most common is sharing with friends something they would enjoy (X—=3.67). This is the only one that reached a higher mean than three. The lowest was related to the production and uploading of videos online (X—=1.68). It did not come as a surprise when during the workshops, we found only one YouTuber, despite the immense popularity of YouTube and YouTubers.

This male student -Tiago- was 14 years old and he was a very committed gamer. His YouTube channel was devoted to gameplays and his videos were meant to show “how to play and how a game is developed”. This was a recent endeavor: at the time of the interview, the first video had been uploaded about a month ago. Despite this recency and the fact that it had less than 350 subscribers, his channel was already paying off: he was doing game reviews for an online store in exchange for free access to games. He was also in talks with a Brazilian network in order to increase his channel’s popularity and profit from ads and endorsements. He was also part of a group of fellow YouTubers with the purpose of “helping everyone grow at the same time” thanks to mutual “likes, comments on videos to help and everything else”.

Tiago was also a member of some YouTubers’ groups on Facebook, planning to share his videos among his peers, a practice he had not done yet: “this way we can help each other; as I watch their videos, maybe they’ll watch mine”. He usually shares his videos on his timeline, but they can only reach a very limited audience as Tiago restricts his account to his friends. He used Facebook “to talk with them, to see their images and stuff like that”, he said during the interview. Despite these intentions and enthusiasm, this teen considered himself more of a gamer than a YouTuber. And shortly after the fieldwork, he deleted his YouTube channel.

Tiago, like the rest of the sample, had a strong preference for activities with everyday friends: besides playing online with fellow high-ranked gamers, he had bought a new and therefore, inferior Counter Strike account so that he could play with his friends, namely his classmates; the rest of the sample shares this preference. Production and participation have the closest social circles as almost exclusive audiences. For instance, private groups were extremely relevant places to share contents, such as news or information regarding school or hobbies with friends. Dinis, a 15-year-old male student, exemplifies these practices: he was a futsal player and was part of a Facebook private group that was used to share useful information, such as “the schedule and meeting point” for practice and matches. Concerning publishing on his timeline, he was “not into it”.

Friends’ birthdays were for many of the Portuguese teenagers, an opportunity to create and produce small videos. This was particularly evident among the senior class from the rural school and exemplifies the typical production made by the Portuguese sample: occasional, simple and meant to be a small-scale creation. These characteristics are visible in the two following descriptions. The first was made by a 15-year-old female student, Raquel, during the interview:

Usually we collect photos during the year for instance at birthdays or festivities. We collect the photos and then, in Flipagram, we upload the images we want. We can choose the music, subtitles, effects; we only have to manage it the way we want it and click on save or publish and then it goes to social media.

This second description was extracted from an interview with a male student, Jerónimo (12 years old): “I usually share photos, but videos where I’m in, just with my parents’ authorization... And I share on WhatsApp or Messenger, but with friends”. His videos weren’t meant for a large audience because he wasn’t comfortable with it. “I think I’m not old enough to share things”, he said.

Privacy was a main issue among the Portuguese teens, as Jerónimo’s statement showed. Publicly exposing personal tastes or their image was not welcomed. One student from the senior class from the urban school jokingly said during the workshops (about sharing things related to videogames on social networks): “No, I have a reputation to preserve!”. This small sentence summarized what was found in the overall Portuguese sample. Even among content creators, public exposition was not welcomed. Ema was a 13-year-old female student and she was a huge Harry Potter fan, having created an anonymous Instagram account to follow and interact with other fans and to upload images (slightly editing them, for instance, by adding some sentences) about this transmedia story. She was also a regular fan fiction reader and a writer herself. However, she never shared her own texts or tried to produce image-based stories. On the one hand, she felt she did not have the time and technical knowledge to do it. On the other hand, when we asked if she was also afraid of other people’s comments, she just nodded her head.

Questionnaires also showed the importance of privacy/image management in the Portuguese teenagers’ lives. Attitudes such as thinking twice before uploading a picture of themselves or about the impact their own videos might have if uploaded scored high mean values: 4.22 and 3.95. Besides, they also expect their peers to be cautious about their image: most would want them to use common sense or to ask for their permission first. These conclusions were transversal to the Portuguese sample: there was not found relevant differences between classes -senior or junior- or schools -urban or rural-. However, questionnaires showed that girls were more regular creators of contents, such videos recorded while at a friend’s home (X—=3,04) or pictures, were taken to be published online (X—=3,22). Boys’ means were 2.35 and 2.52, respectively. The rest of the research techniques, although, pointed to very simple, one-click creations.

Spain: main findings

Spanish teenagers are also mostly consumers, as the data from questionnaires show. They frequently watch TV (X—=4.67), films and series (X—=3.08) and play videogames (X—=3.44). But the data also reveal that some are producing a great variety of contents, ranging from written texts to graphics or mods for videogames, among others. This diversity is very unequal in terms of distribution, intensity and complexity. The most regular productions are related to photography and videos. In some cases, they are performed on a day-to-day basis. Two production trends have been observed: creations are either spontaneous or planned.

The type of production varies depending on its final goal, usually associated with its dissemination, but it also responds to certain motivations. In the case of spontaneous production, these are photos or videos that are made to be shared on different social media platforms that we could deem as “closed”, such as WhatsApp or Snapchat. Planned production takes place in conjunction with the use of social media platforms that entail a broader and more public way of sharing, such as Instagram or YouTube. Spontaneous production, in most cases, seeks to represent daily life, through images and videos of the daily activities of adolescents and their interactions with peers. When they talk with their groups of friends or classmates in a non-public conversation, sometimes they insert photos of the activities or moments they are living, as exemplified by Nora, a female 17-year-old:

—Nora: Snapchat is more ... your life ... I don’t know, maybe here [in Instagram] what you do is put up your pretty photos. You know? Edited and all … While Snapchat is more ... if you want to share a photo, you share it ...

—Researcher: So, you don’t care about aesthetics on Snapchat?

—Nora: Yes, that’s right.

These productions encompass some degree of planning, such as choosing frames, roles, positions and filters, but they are not as organized or structured as the ones meant to Instagram or YouTube, which are clearly less recurrent. In these cases, productions become a form of representation of their own public identity and they are carried out in a way that could be defined as more sophisticated. To achieve it, they have a series of media references that are mainly influencers, which serve as a source of inspiration. Teenagers find in them role models for the representation of their own selves. Some teenagers follow and imitate those influencers with whom they identify the most. The latter become, to a certain extent, aspirational models. These teenagers see themselves reflected in those influencers, adopting and imitating the characteristics of their products. Therefore, when they create planned products, they sometimes perform an additional previous step in comparison to spontaneous products: conceiving the product by searching for inspiration and references. This is exemplified in the following extract from an interview with Laura, a 17-year-old female:

Well, I follow sites like Tumblr and girly stuff that you can find online and share any photo. There are photos that give you many ideas on how to take your own ones. I use some of the ideas and I say “Oh, look, this must be fine”. And sometimes, well, you try it and you say “Oh, yes, it’s fine …”.

Some adolescents plan their photos before creating them. We observe teenagers’ planning skills when they look for special locations, when they plan the frames and their position within them, etc. This procedure is much more common when they are creating photos than when they are producing videos. They claim to be more spontaneous while recording videos, but we can also find organization, planning and structure, as exemplified by Victor, a 16-year-old male:

It was a bit like “let’s see what we are going to record, what ideas we have” ... We said “What game? Call Of Duty. Well, then, Call Of Duty. Team duel”, like “Let’s see, you make the intro and I say we’re (name omitted), that we’re here in my house ...”. Well, we didn’t write a script but we gotta try to organize ourselves a little bit. It was all on the fly. We didn’t intend to do it totally professionally, at least at that moment, but well, at least we added a short introduction, who we are, what game we are going to play, for what ...

Some of these products are usually worked on at a later stage, in a post-production process. Before being shared, most of the adolescents apply different filters and some of them plan the whole editing stage. With this, they edit their photographs and videos with the aim of making aesthetic modifications. In these processes adolescents show their skills through the usage of digital tools such as Afterlight, VSCOCam or VivaVideo, among others: 17 teenagers stated they know and/or use digital tools for editing photos and 19 for videos.

All these products are created individually and collectively, depending on the context and environment. If the adolescents are sharing an activity and decide to take a photo to publish it, they carry it out collectively. But this does not prevent individual photos from also being taken spontaneously as well. The same happens in the case of planned productions. The main difference is in the skills they develop through the process. When they carry out group productions, they acquire other skills associated with social management, such as the ability to coordinate or lead, for example. It should be noted that in most cases collective productions are made within the peer group. As in the case of Portugal and Italy, Spanish teenagers are worried about the image of themselves that they project on social networks. This could justify both the predominance of spontaneous productions, created to be shared only with friends and family, and the obvious concern with planning and editing the ones meant to larger audiences.

Finally, the variety and complexity of their productions are also linked to motivations, namely entertainment (associated with pleasure and fun), relationship with peers and popularity. If they create for peers in closed contexts, their process is less complex and more intuitive. On the other hand, if they create for open contexts, with popularity as the main motivation, their process becomes much more complex and they acquire other skills through it. It is important to emphasize the importance of entertainment as the engine of the production process. Teenagers make these products because they enjoy carrying them out -they are not imposed tasks-. And this is also deeply associated with their relationship with peers.

In the Spanish context, we found some differences between schools and socio-cultural contexts. In Barcelona’s educational context, there is a high correlation between the school typology and the sociocultural and economic background of the students’ families. Despite the existence of similar practices related to the production of photos and videos, the students from the double-founding school showed more sensibility with the cultural environment and were more engaged in practices such as, for example, writing. On the other hand, as in the case of Portugal and Italy girls were more regular creators of photos.

Italy: main findings

Italian teens show a quite traditional approach to media consumption, being mostly focused on “watching” videos and tv contents. Television is one of the most used media (X—=4.31). During the workshops and the interviews, teens stated they watch tv because it gave them a sense of belonging and identification, also in the relationship with parents, creating an intergenerational bridge. It is important to underline that tv in Italy has historically played an important role in socializing. Already since that time, tv has established itself as a contemporary storyteller (^{Bechelloni, 1995}). Subsequently, in the era of Berlusconi, tv played a political role, but it also turned out as an agent of strong change in Italian society (^{Abruzzese, 1994}).

Today its role resists, even if the model of use of Italian adolescents has changed: tv consumption is more selective, also because, with the advent of digital TV, the offer has considerably increased (^{Scaglioni & Sfardini, 2017}). So, in addition to the media contents typical of participatory cultures, a large number of teenagers choose traditional media genres closely linked to the generalist cultural industries: from Italian series to reality-shows or cult movies. This kind of media consumption is more relevant among females than among males, as well as among older teens compared to the 12-13-year-old ones. Regarding music, teens say that they use Spotify or watch videos on YouTube; they rarely create their own playlists or share contents. The use of social network sites is also relevant (X—=4.45), but it must be noticed that, according to the media diaries, teens dedicate a lot of time, in their daily routine just checking the notifications on their social profiles, in particular on WhatsApp and Instagram. Furthermore, the majority of teenagers stated that their prevailing activity is watching the flow of online contents on social networks, rather than uploading original artefacts.

Among the teens who are producers, the most recurrent creativity practices confirmed by the questionnaire and the interviews, are related to sharing things with friends (X—=3.62) and posting photos online (X—=2.74). From the interviews and the diaries it emerges that Instagram and WhatsApp are the most used platforms for sharing pictures, adding in many cases phrases picked up from songs or poems. Teenagers express several concerns about exposing themselves online: in the questionnaires they declare that their main concerns about digital life are related to uploading personal photos on the web (X—=4.10), or to the impact that an own video could have on the online audience (X—=3.26). In any case, they prefer not to be active users on their profiles, as exemplified by the following statement:

—Researcher: Why are you not active on social media? Is it because you don’t like it? Don’t you have enough time? Do you consider it in bad taste? Or is privacy the reason?

—Darío, male student, 16 years old: [The reason is] personal enough because I do not consider it bad taste ... in fact I have nothing against those who post photos every day, every week, that’s okay …, but it’s a personal choice, I prefer to follow others, to see what others do without ... posting my personal stuff.

Through the data, we notice that some socio-demographic aspects seem to have a significant role in defining digital practices and attitudes: in particular gender and age. In fact, we noticed that females (X—=1.28) were less used to share personal videos than males (X—=1.65). However, girls (X—=1.90) produced and shared more narrative productions as for example in Wattpad, than boys (X—=1.30). Secondly, we observed that younger subjects (in particular those from lower secondary school) were more involved in all the creative and sharing practices respect to the older ones.

The social and psychological concerns about exposing their own content online are different. The first reason, outlined in many interviews with both males and females, is an accentuated modesty in showing themselves off, revealing themselves both physically and emotionally. For example, Daniele, a 16-year-old male student, said:

Looking at my friends’ pages, I see certain photos that make you say: “What are they doing?”. Some girls like to show their breasts and sometimes their mouth, adding really philosophical phrases such as: “Oh, look at my mouth …”. I really detest this kind of things.

Pressure and social control come not only from invisible and unknown publics (^{boyd, 2010}), but also from their own social circle: parents, first of all, who often exercise a more or less indirect control over the teens media practices, suggesting they not exposing themselves too much, but also, in some cases, their peers. For example, Federica, a 16-year-old female student, during the interview talked a lot about how before posting anything online she must have “the approval” of her boyfriend, who directly controls (having the passwords) and censures all her social profiles. So, she just posts contents about landscapes, animals and generic pictures.

Furthermore, another reason, which seems to interfere with the media production by teenagers is their perception of not being able to fulfill the aesthetic expectations of an imaginary audience. Many of the interviewed feel that they do not have the skills required to be part of the social media “star system”: this low sense of self-efficacy is rarely related to technical issues (for example, being able to edit a video), and in the majority of cases, is based on a rigorous and often sophisticated critical judgment about the quality of media content, the recognition of the several features and characteristics needed to be successful in the social media arena, leading them, therefore, to the conclusion that they themselves do not have the creative and artistic qualities to be appreciated online. Federico, a 14-year-old male student, gives us an example: “We made some challenges on video, as the ‘Ice bucket challenge’, but we didn’t post them online since we are not famous or sufficiently amazing to go online”. Following the same argument, Milena, a 12-year-old female student, stated:

I would like to be a creator, but … not boring … there are some people so boring, they talk about how they decorated their bedroom, their agenda, it is something nobody is interested in … you must be a little bit crazy to entertain, not just stupid. I’m not able to be so.

For these reasons, remixing of popular contents, parodies, as well as generic landscape pictures or memes are the most produced contents, since they allow teenagers both to express their feelings in a mediated way and to shape them according to successful media and social formats.

To conclude, Italian teenagers showed they possess good skills when it comes to media awareness and attention to privacy. They in fact are able to evaluate media contents both from an aesthetical point of view both respect their ethical and social issues and to take into account of such evaluations before of producing and posting online. At the same time, in some cases these skills seem to function as inhibitors of online participation acting as factors for social and media conformism, rather than as drivers of autonomy, extraversion and digital creativity.