Social Communication of Children Younger School Age in the Digital Era

The Internet, a new phenomenon of the global information infrastructure and access to information, was born in the seventies of the last century and began to affect significantly the way we communicate, collect and share information. Nowadays, it penetrated to new dimensions of its development, as developing multimedia technologies and content (Web 2.0), as well as new phenomenal contacts: mobile communications (mobile phones, smart phones, tablets) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter and a lot of others). The Internet is used nowadays worldwide by one third of people, we register incredible five billion subscribers to mobile services; in economically developed countries one user has more than one prepaid mobile service. This modern paradigm obviously affected and influenced also the younger generation. It is clear that the time that has come requires to learn new literacy -media literacy, but also to gain or acquire new social skills, especially how to orient, and most recently, to self-realize in the multimedia on-line space. This is a series of new communications competences and skills that include the ability to search, select, analyse, evaluate, create, and thus to pass information in variety of formats – by word, image, sound. Recently, it includes also with the integration of all these elements – it means the multimedia integration. Our study explore the extent to which children of nowadays communicate through the electronic media, and how much time they spend watching the individual kinds of media. Keywords : social networks, new communication competences, new literacy of children younger school age, preferred ways and forms of communication, digital literacy, media literacy, media education curriculum.