Korzystanie z mediów społecznościowych jako praktyka społeczna różnych pokoleń medialnych

Karl Mannheim (1928/1952) in essay ‘The Problem of Generations’ from the late 1920s as well as José Ortega y Gasset (1923/1931, 1930/1932), in interwar period, were probably first writing about ‘the rhythm of ages’ (Ortega y Gasset 1923/1931: 15) by which societies were changing. It seems that the interest of both Mannheim and Ortega y Gasset was thus not primarily the generations themselves, but rather generations as an explanatory factor for understanding why societies were changing. However, a generation, in Mannheim’s sense, is a group of people who have a similar relation to societal happenings. This concept were and actually still is explored by numerous of scientist in past decades. From media-related perspective, the most important thing in this so-called generations’ paradigm is – in fact – the media experience during growing up is relevant in defining generations and their media consumption cultures (Aroldi 2011). According to Siibak et al. (2014) each generation grows up with a specific style of media usage and culture (responding to the available media-scape), which helps to differentiate audience practices of a generation (Schäffer 2003; Colombo 2011). It seems that the experience with media and technologies on the formative years of a generation shape some features of their audience practices in the course of the whole lifecycle of its members. Consequently different generations have been labeled as mediagenerations (Vittadini et al. 2013) We can even mention some of them, for instance, the ’radio generation’ (Maas and Gonzales 2005), ‘net generation’ (Tapscott 1998), the ‘digital natives’ (Prensky 2001), ‘generation X’ (Coupland 1991) and ‘digital generation’ (Edmunds & Turner 2005, Buckingham & Willett 2006). In recent years we can observe appearing a new aspects of mentioned above mediagenerations. I would call it “subgenerations” dedicated to specific trend, phenomenon, activity, or even particularly applications like Facebook or Snapchat (See: Opermann, 2014). In this publication research team would like to present a results from empirical research dedicated to way of using Facebook and Snapchat by representatives of different generations. The main questions were: what are the purposes of using FB/SNAP platform? Do social media – specifically FB/SNAM app - shape conformist attitudes? If so, how they do it? Finally, what kind of models of behavior in social media (FB/SNAP) we can distinguish between different generations? Three groups of respondents were invited to the study: people that remember times before internet era (born before 1975, probably ‘digital immigrants’), people that were growing up with some usage of internet (born late 1980, early 1990, probably ‘Millenniums’), and finally people living and knowing only times of internet, somehow immersed in the internet (born late 1990, after 2000, probably ‘digital natives’). All three groups went through (in this order) Eyetracking / UX experiment (with tasks to do) with using Facebook and/or Snapchat, then they were answering the questionnaire and finally participating in Focus Group Interviewing about mentioned social platforms (three homogenous generation groups – 8-12 persons). Results from all, three research steps were triangulated. This research were conducted in Laboratory of Media Studies et Warsaw University in the end of 2017.