Children and New Media Literacy: an Egytian case study

Abstract

The use children make of the new media has become a widespread phenomenon in the world. For example, more than a quarter of the world's population (1,200 million) use the Internet (Tayie, 2009). Because of the new media, the world is becoming smaller. More and more we access the culture and knowledge that used to be beyond our horizon. Today´s information society has great potential, especially for young people (Carlsson, 2009: 10).This article discusses the results of a qualitative pilot study on the use that children make of the media, conducted among Egyptian children both, in an urban and in a rural area. The study is part of a comparative project (2009-2011) on the participation of young people in the media (Youth Media Participation) funded by the Academy of Finland that includes, particularly, Finland, Egypt, Argentina and India. The main objective of the project is to obtain information on the use that children make of the new media, ie the internet and mobile phones; on their knowledge and participation in the media.The research project began with the collection of data in the form of day journals (blogs) and focus interviews, which were analyzed as reference material for future interviews, and with quantitative data collected through questionnaires completed by the end of 2010 in those four countries. This article presents the results of the interviews conducted in Egypt.