Mobile Connection, Digital Generation and Visibility

Abstract

Smartphones have become an important tool for adolescents to access information, talk with friends, consume online content, and share images on social media. How do teenagers appropriate these platforms to express the world around themselves and to build on their identities through mobile applications? With the objective to contribute to the knowledge about this phenomenon from Communication perspectives, this article discusses the use of apps among adolescents in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, as a channel for visibility from the context of digital culture. It begins with an understanding of the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), highlighting the advent of smartphones; after that it addresses the concept of digital generation and its specificities in the age of connectivity when it comes to visibility, dialoguing with Le Breton (2017a, 2017b), Palfrey and Gasser (2008), Livingstone (2011), and Sibilia (2016). From this point, the author presents an empirical qualitative research conducted with 32 teenagers, using participant observation (Cottle, 2009) and semi-structured interviews (Triviños, 1987), in a public school in Belo Horizonte, applying Content Analysis (Bardin, 1977) to analyze the transformations that the mediation of mobile devices bring to the relations of this young generation with visibility practices. Results show that although coming from an underdeveloped community, the group has been using smartphones in their daily life since an early age, a majority of them spend more than ⅓ of the day online, mostly on social media, and ephemeral images are now a significant part of their visual digital expression.