Nordicom is a knowledge centre for the area of media and communication research, a cooperation between the five countries of the Nordic region – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
Our work aims at developing media studies and at helping to ensure that research results are made visible in the treatment of media issues at different levels in both the public and private sector.
Nordicom publishes a large number of publications on media and ongoing trends in media development, our aim being to provide answers to complex questions concerning our contemporary media culture in the age of digitalization and globalization.
We receive questions on a daily basis regarding the media habits of children and youth and the effects of new communication patterns. How have these changes affected children and youth? What has happened to TV viewing, listening to the radio and reading newspapers? Do young people still read books and magazines? Do they understand what they read? What is the role of social media? Who are the most active media users? What groups are excluded? The questions are many and they are often quite complicated.
There is no doubt that we are talking about a changed communication society with new communication patterns. Digitalization along with extensive media convergence is changing the communication system fundamentally with regard to time and space as well as social behaviour. This is particularly true for children and youth. Not since the introduction of television have we seen such radical changes in young people’s media culture than in the past ten years. These changes can have both short- and long-term effects. If we are to make decisions that have sustainable effects in the long run – especially from the perspective of democracy – we need knowledge of relevance.
There is a demand for current statistics in this area, and Nordicom has now compiled a selection of statistics on young people and media in the Nordic countries. It is our hope that this overview will contribute to increasing the knowledge base on young people’s media use in today’s network society.