Foit the theory of media generations our results show that the development of personalty might be initiated by experiencing the [] difference between generations in terms of media usage. From the kids perspective, the generational differences are mainly connected to their capabilities: They just cannot read and are thus not able to, for instance, read books or the wikipedia, and the kids are aware of that fact. Thus there is a difference between the generations.
But we didn't observe different conjunctive experience spaces. According to the [] perception of the interviewed kids, parents and other grown ups all use computer technology in the different forms available as a matter of course. It's just normal. Something like a distance to computer technology by older generations is not reported by the kids. Additionally, the kids do not devalorise the media usage of their parents.
Since both points: different conjunctive experience spaces and a devalorisation of older peoples media use are the main observations Schäffer reported in his study, and both could not be reproduced in our study, it seems that the generation theory based on the concept of Mannheim is not suitable to understand the media use of 3-6 year old children.
Still, children do experience a distance to their parents. But this distance is, from a kids perspective, [] created by parents: Parents set up rules for media usage, but they do, according to the children, not apply these rules to themselves Thus children experience their media use as governed by their parents. Additionally, children do experience media as something disturbing their relation to their parents. Parents do not respond to children while surfing the net or watching TV. It appears that by setting up rules and letting media disturb their relation with their kids parents construct a media childhood space.
The media childhood space reported by the kids in our study suggests to refer to another theory of generations: As Schleiermacher has suggested in the 18th century, education needs to be understood in terms of generations. This theory of generations seems to be more appropriate to understand the media use of children. This suggestion is supported by the observation that the children interviewed in our study describe their vision of being adult as using media as adults do.
Thus the term media generation seems to be appropriate, but it has to be defined differently.