When Teenagers Make a Video About Cyberbullying: A Citizen Action?
The research presented focuses on the problem of cyberbullying. It would like to provide an answer to the following question: To what extent the publication in social media of a video about cyberbullying among adolescents is a citizen action? Based on the thinking of the philosopher Habermas, we define a citizen action as an act situated in a given sociohistorical context, which aims to respond to a given social problem by mobilizing knowledge and technical means and whose primary purpose should be the transformation of society. Three individual interviews and 14 focus groups with 75 teenagers attending a youth center were conducted. Their analysis show that adolescents do not make the transformation of society a priority when they produce videos on a social theme such as cyberbullying and that they give little importance to the need of documenting the discourse content in their videos. Their video productions, therefore, can not be considered as civic actions in the strict sense. The results also show that adolescents are attracted by the appropriation of video languages and techniques and by public recognition. Educational priorities based on these findings are proposed. In particular, it is suggested to integrate basic notions of social psychology within any media related teaching, as adolescents tend to think that mass communication targeting a large population can result in rapid and widespread social change.