Dr. Sakari Taipale's book: "Intergenerational Connections in Digital Families"

Dr. Sakari Taipale, a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Social Informatics, University of Ljubljana, whose primary position is at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, has written a book Intergenerational Connections in Digital Families. The book illustrates how everyday family life gets digitalized in three European countries. It looks into the relationships between different generations from the technology use perspective in Finland, Italy and Slovenia. The Slovenian data was gathered with help of the student and Associete Professor Vesna Dolničar at FDV.

“In Finland, everyday family communication is largely based on short text messages and phone calls, which maintain a sense of togetherness when face-to-face meetings are scarce”, Taipale says. “Messaging has in recent years, both in Italy and Finland, expanded to WhatsApp and Facebook, which enables communication between several family members at the same time”.

In Slovenia, family communities are more compact and distances are shorter than in Finland or Italy. In Slovenian families, several generations typically live close to each other, usually on the same plot or in the same house. In general, distances are short.

”In Slovenia, family members help each other more regularly in issues related to the use gadgets and applications as well as technology purchases because they live closer to each other. Instead, the need for families to communicate digitally is clearly more scarce than in Finland because it can be done face to face”, Taipale points out.