Smart families and community

Abstract

The subject matter here turns directly to the digital society and its effect on family life and family members of different ages and intergenerational relations, based on the idea of 6 Smart families. Such a family comprises active users of the internet and social media intergenerationally, leading on to the issue of ‘opportunities’ versus ‘risks’ in social networking and parents’ approach to it. Opportunities include the opening up of unlimited knowledge and data to family users individually and jointly. Set against this attraction is the world of fake news and the interpersonal damage that the uncontrolled internet through social networking can do. The discussion finishes with the pros and cons of media education and control. The unresolved and most challenging feature of family digitalisation, as the CONVID-19 virus pandemic revealed, is the lack of access to educational and technical resources, largely through poverty of a substantial minority of the youth population.