Summary Theme 3:  Our Media

Our students:

First of all we use Facebook. We all have a Vagab-account, for our project- communication, but we also have a personal account for common use.  Facebook is an international site, so you can communicate with people all over the world. So you can with Twitter, a site where you can post short (max. 140 characters) messages to your followers.  And you can follow the messages of others.

We also have Hyves. Hyves is some sort of Facebook, but only for Dutch people. On Hyves you can ‘krabbel ‘ (Dutch for ‘scribble’) each other.  Which means you can send (short) messages to the profiles of the people you are friends with. Also you can chat with each other, watch photos and  videos and decorate your profile in your own personal way.

For longer, and in many cases more serious communication we use e-mail. Hotmail is a very common e-mail programme, as well as G-mail (we actually use G-mail for the VAGAB-project). The communication for school related things runs via the special Odulphus email account that every student and teacher has.

Our mobile phone is becoming more and more important. When you have internet on your mobile (and most us students have) you can use Pinkchat and Whatsapp. It’s chatting and texting for free. A lot of us have a laptop, a mobile computer you can bring to school or anywhere you like, so you can use it at every time of the day.

We listen to the radio sometimes, mostly by internet. But not for hearing the news, but for listening to music. But most of the time we listen to music that we put on our mp3-player. We watch the news on TV (but not that often), or we read the news on special news sites on the internet like for instance nu.nl (now.nl).  Some of us read the newspaper every morning.

We watch a lot of TV. Up to three or four hours a day.  Programmes we like are C.S.I., Desperate Housewifes, My Super Sweet Sixteen and Family Guy (international TV-programmes)and De Wereld Draait Door (famous Dutch television show).
We use the computer for about 2 hours a day.

Our parents:

Our parents did not have any of the High Tech communication stuff we use a lot nowadays. No computers, no mobile phones and no mp3-players. How on earth could they survive???

Well, they say they read books, they read the paper and some of them had a TV. They listened to the radio a lot. It was an important source for information. Just like books. When you wanted to know something, you read a book.
They communicated by phone, not mobile phones, but by old fashioned private lines.  It wasn’t very easy to make an appointment with a friend. It was quite common to just  go to a friend's place to see if he/she was home. Nowadays, such has become quite unthinkable.

Nowadays, a lot of fathers still stick to the 8 o’ clock news on TV. But our parents also use mobile phones and all the other modern ways of communication. For our grandparents that’s mostly a little different. They are often too old (so they say) to keep up with the technical developments.