Introduction

Dear reader,

This online collection compiles publications and doctoral dissertations, completed and published in 2011-2015 within the grant project 8527 “Generations and inter-generational relationships in the emerging information society”, financed by Estonian Science Foundation.

The main objective of the project was to analyse the experiences different age groups have in their daily encounters with and usage practices of traditional and new media. We explored different generations’ perception of media use and interaction between generations in the process of socialisation into the emerging information society. Besides school-aged children, adolescents and young people, the project focused on pre-schoolers as a group on which relatively scarce knowledge is available. We observed two main agents of socialisation – parents and teachers – and their role distribution in sharing socialising tasks. Moreover, focussing upon peers and siblings as agents of socialisation enabled us to map a relatively large part of the contemporary field of socialisation.

Our research questions form three groups; accordingly, we have divided our 50 publications into three chapters:

1. Age groups as media audiences
2. Generations’ media-related perceptions, experiences and attitudes
3. Patterns of interaction between the agents of socialisation

The second part of the collection contains links to three doctoral dissertations, related to the project topic.

The last section introduces the main authors.

Enjoy reading!