Dealing with ambiguity in practices of knowing: What current youth faces

In today’s age of communication and information technology one faces the day waking up to a world that provides us instant waves of information when accessing our media devices. Youngsters show intensive use of digital media in their everyday lives and seem to adopt new approaches in communicating with others and in addressing information. The increasing complexity that comes along with the globalizing world involves dealing with ambiguity in social practices of knowing. This paper questions how they face and deal with ambiguity when being online and engaged in communication and information. By means of analyzing interviews with 14 pupils in which they show how they use interactive media, we can see that youth faces three challenges: maniness, multivoicedness, and dispersion. Based on identifying the challenges and characterizing the qualities of the current generation youth we will discuss how to deal with the three challenges and what implications these might have for the educational practices.