Digital media usage and intergenerational transfer of culture

Marju Lauristin

Institute of Journalism and Communication, University of Tartu

The coming of digital age has accelerated generation change in cultural field as from the perspective of cultural production, as from the perspective of audiences. This is creating new challenges for the transmission of cultural heritage to the younger generation. When the shift from the oral to the written media had taken millennia, the emergence of the ‘Gutenbrerg galaxy’ had happened in centuries, the shift from the print media to the audiovisual media was complete in decades, then now we can observe how the habits of media usage are changing patterns of cultural communication within couple of years. The intergenerational gap in the media usage patterns is challenging the capacity of media to preserve and transfer the shared meanings of the core cultural texts which had served as the foundation for the construction and preservation of the national identities. Taking for the starting point the national survey data reflecting the growing importance of the digital media as the channels for transmission of cultural content, the speaker will elaborate further the concept of cultural shift, focusing on the effects of digital media usage on the intergenerational transfer of culture.