Abstract

This paper is focused on the role of main social activities, as creating and sharing personal content. The reason is connected to the raise up, in last ten years, of User Generated Content as a system to allow people to be active on the Web3. In the first paragraph I analyze the Web-population through recent surveys, showing different ways to classify generations. I comment the Jenkins’ “convergence culture” [2006], the push and pull media definition of Negroponte [1995] and the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants [Prensky 2001]. The second paragraph deals with use and consumption of digital media between young and adults from the computer use to mobile-phone and portable gaming device. In particular the mobile-phone seems to be an important medium to be online in every place and every time: it allows people to take and share photos, video, text and so on. This brings us to the third paragraph where I discuss mobility and applications: following Anderson [2010] the desktop is replaced with the webtop or web-applications that do not require a browser to be used. This is particularly evident for recent mobile devices as iPhone and iPad. Convergence and mobility allow people to share content in every time: yet ten years ago people used to share digital information as video, music and text, by illegal channels such as Napster, without knowing who uploaded that on the Web. The Web 1.0 phase was characterized by an “anonymous dimension”. Instead, the current Web allows people to share information about their own life, publishing on social media, freely, their own photo, video, text, with real name and surname. At the center of the Web is the “ego”, the user. In the fifth chapter I analyze three social media that are currently catching up people’s attention - Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and I try to explain how they make possible to users to share culture and frame of their life. At the end I spent some words about piracy and privacy issue that social media bring up.