Virtualni svijet djece i mladih: izazovi na putu odrastanja

The media raises our children and form an important part of their daily lives. It is impossible to imagine life without the presence of the media. They are the main source of information, content, and topics on upbringing, education, culture, politics, and entertainment. The media are socializing agent which impact on society, children and youth is significant. Accordingly, there should be a greater social intention for media education and training. The role of media education in our schools is still underused, often marginalized and sometimes misunderstood by both teachers, preschool teachers, children and young people. The number of media, internet users and profiles and social networks is growing every day, as evidenced by numerous studies, but there is not enough education for the media nor education for critical thinking. Therefore, in this paper we tried to explore the media habits of children and youth in the local community, with special reference to the time that they spent on the Internet, mostly on social networks, and whether the time spent affected their daily interactions with the environment, friends, family and, at the end of the day, their succes in school. We where interested in how much they used social network, at what age they created their profiles, and how free they felt in providing information about themselves and others through the media. According to the results, children create their profiles on social networks at a very early stage, even when they are not ready or educated for it. In addition, children are very open to the virtual world of communication with the people they do not know in real life, even to meet strangers without being aware of possible manipulation, false profiles, violence and the like. There is a clear awareness among most respondents about the need for media education, regardless of the difference in the amount of time that they spend on social networks, as well as a clearly articulated stand on the need to introduce media education as part of compulsory education in schools.