Readers, writers and new technologies. Kids, Facebook and Violetta

Abstract

Children are developing a complex relationship with new technologies, which forms and variables are constantly changing. In this paper, we address the relationship between children and new technologies through interactions, given that participation in social media lies to a great extent on a conversational behaviour that fictionalizes communication. Social media encourage a form of participation that focuses on connectivity over connectedness (Van Dijck, 2013); the analysis shows that being connected does not necessarily entail communication. The observation of children’s comments in the Facebook page of the TV series Violetta confirms the hypothesis of the “symbolic participation” (Reich, 2011: 99) or the “fictionalization of participation” (Duek, 2013), especially in those media that are organized around the production of on line comments. If comments synthesize the relationship between the readers and writers in collaborative technologies (Calabrese, 2016), it remains, generally, perfectly monologic.