Digital media and children age 0-6: a snapshot on Europe

Media socialization in preschool age presents an ever increasing phenomenon, which involves children from the first year of life with different intensity and in different ways. Digital natives, in fact, in contrast with the “Gutenberg” children, are naturally inclined to using new technologies and this inclination comes from the opportunity to live many and various experiences which also include the development of different brain structures. (Prensky 2001, Ferri 2011). This contribution comes from the reflection on preschool socialization shared within the cycle of in-depth seminars “Media before school. An empirical reflexion on the socialization 0-6” organized by the Mediamonitor Minor Observatory, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy within the project Inf@nzia DIGI.Tales 3.6. At the moment, American context appears to be the most researched one: here, the key findings from the main European research around the interaction of the “universe of minors” with technologies will be presented from a multidisciplinary point of view, which includes scientific areas which are necessarily related to this issue such as pedagogy, psychology and neuro-science. The current research intends to contribute to a reconstruction of a map of experiences of international research aimed at delineating the status quo of the methods and key results, as well as of the priorities and best practices that can be transferred and applied to the Italian context.