Minors as creators in the digital age: From prosumer to collaborative creator. Theoretical review 1972-2016

Abstract

This article presents a chronological review of theories that contemplate minors asdigital content creators. Theoretical framework. We have selected material that refers to emergingterminology to describe the online behaviour of juvenile users. Conclusions and discussion. Resultsconfirm that there are diverse new words and phrases for describing and labelling young people‘sonline presence and participation. The plethora of neologisms contributes to experts categorizingdifferent users as ―generations‖ of digital content creators yet the time period elapsed between eachnew generation is very short and we observe that the differences in the way users interact with thetechnology are very small: we have observed designations such as the WhatsApp, Twitter, selfie andSnapchat generations. Therefore we question what really determines a new generation of youngcreators of digital content and we argue against the excessive labelling with the word ―generation‖and propose that groups be referred to by user profiles instead. For this purpose we have compiledinformation about user characteristics according to the way they interact with technology.