Media Revolution and New Educational Challenges

"We need a specific and stable commitment to know and guide the media relations of the very young, starting as early as late childhood; for example and as a first step, we cannot ignore whose fans they are, what music they listen to, what fiction they watch, what they say and how they behave in the chats, what they see and they exchange, so that an educational project, especially that of a family, may take shape in their lives.”

This was the conclusion of Marco Brusati’s* reflection on “The Media Revolution and the New Educational Challenges”, a commentary on the 2017 Report of the Italian Center for Family Studies.

In just a few years, explains Brusati, “four digital generations have come to coexist, cohabitate, while being independent of each other in the media. [...] However, the media is not, as one hears, ‘the world of the very young:’ rather it is an alien world, in which they do not choose but are chosen by algorithms that are studied by adults on the other side of the world, by people who spy on them. in the remotest navigation paths, in order to propose what they think might please them; a place where they are condemned to pursue unfeasible models because they are rebuilt at a table, like the sculpted beauties that draw crowds on social networks; where they are recipients of problematic artistic productions, for example, those in which global stars advise them to have fun using alcohol, drugs, and other people as objects of their own pleasure; in which they use chats programmed to delete videos and photos after the recipient has seen them, without leaving a trace, thus creating a free zone where no adult can enter, verify, help, correct, or educate.

Since communicative emptiness and, even further upstream, relational emptiness—Brusati concludes—cannot exist, those who enter in communication with the very young through the media become, whether we want it or not, their educators.

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* Marco Brusati

Lecturer at the University of Florence in the Master program “Institutional Advertising,” collaborator of the Vatican Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life for the Dublin World Meeting of Families, and Director of the association “Hope” and the “Hope” Music School.

He works in training young creators with the aim of stimulating the growth of a generation of skilled artists, managers, and partners of educational agencies. www.marcobrusati.com