Abstract |
The aim of this research endeavor is to critically investigate how Greece’s contemporary social and cultural context offers specific ways of talking about Adolescent Internet Usage (AIU) and to concomitantly analyze the consequences of such discourses on parent-adolescent relationships. Participants included twenty parents who ranged in age from 45 to 50 years of age and 20 adolescents who ranged in age from 13 to 18 years of age. Data were collected via written letters/epistles and participants were instructed to imagine that they are talking to their children (or parents, respectively) and re-experience a usual argument regarding AUI. Seven parents and four adolescents took part in the pilot phase of the research, in which they were given more specific instructions, whereas the rest of the participants of the modified main phase were encouraged to write more naturally and spontaneously. Data were analyzed following a six stage version of Fucaudian Discourse Analysis (FDA, Willig, 2015) and emphasis was given to the dilemmas and internal contradictions between the participants’ Discourses. Seven different antithetical ways of constructing AIU were identified, which were related to the topics of: 1) frequency and duration of “screen time”, 2) biopsychological health, 3) utility of digital leisure, 4) studying and academic performance, 5) digital risk, 6) family relationships and 7) challenges associated with adolescence. These irreconcilable constructions serve different rhetorical goals and lead to different subject positions for the participants, in ways that sometimes increase and other times constrain their chances for agentic action. Specifically, for parents, the available and sometimes contradictory subject positions of the responsible, authoritative and contemporary parent, of the mature and digitally aware adult, of the digital immigrant and of the former teenager, may also engender feelings of fear, anxiety, anger and guilt and other times empathy and relief about their children’s behavior and their own parenting. Such oscillations seem to readily lead to ambiguity and disorientation, a liminal positioning when it comes to one’s parental role. Similarly, for adolescents, the contradictory positions of the obedient child, the good student, the biopsychologicaly vulnerable and disobedient teenager, the digital native, the conscious and agentic actor and the digitally aware future adult, might sometimes spur feelings of anxiety, oppression, anger or guilt and other times relief and empathetic understanding of their parents’ feelings, leading again to a state of confusion about the “balanced” AIU and management of family relationships. The findings are discussed taking into account the current scientific literature, which emphasizes the parental and adolescent digital dilemmas in a social reality where the available Discourses about AIU are highly contradictory. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the research and we propose suggestions for future investigation and application, aiming at a more complex and contemporary perspective and management of family, scientific and social debates about AIU.
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