Youth, one's own room and the Digital Culture

Abstract

If there is a space that permits close-up observation of the transformation of the contemporary family with respect to the way parents treat their children (and how their children treat them), we could perhaps direct our attention to the adolescents' bedroom. This is not to say that the private space was any less relevant in the past (from the 1960's onwards young people adopted Virginia Woolf's old slogan A Room of My Own). What has happened in the last decade is that this territory of femininity has been juvenilized, affecting all social groups, as a bastion and an emergent laboratory of juvenile microculture, which, besides the public space, finds its emblem in the real and virtual contacts that are made from this "room of one's own". This article presents a first outline of the results of an ethnographic study of this question, although, before setting it out, we propose a theoretical model of the changes in parent-children relations (what we call the "generational clock") and a general panorama (based on recent statistical data) of the relation of young people with digital culture, one of the foundations of bedroom cultures.