Generational belonging between media audiences and ICT users

This article aims to present some ideas about the relation between “media” and “generations” and, in a more specific way, between ICTs and generations of their users. The main questions are: firstly, whether (and how) media take part in the construction of generational identities; secondly, whether (and how) generational belonging affects media usage and sense-making in the everyday practices of media consumption; finally, what the differences introduced by ICTs in this relation between “media” and “generations” are. After the proposal of a model of the generation-building process based on a definition of “generation” in agreement with a review of the sociological literature, the article describes the roles played by the media in this model and in different theoretical approaches and finally discusses the new developments introduced by ICTs.