VIEWS OF THE WORLD AND LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE OF NEWS: RESEARCHING YOUTH, NEWS, AND CITIZENSHIP IN PORTUGAL

Abstract

A central objective of a Portuguese research project on Young people, News and Digital citizenship – YouNDigital (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021) is to grab news definitions and their connection with youth’s (aged 15-24) democratic needs. The project relies on complementary methods to approach the senses of what news is and how young people get in touch with the world. We developed a representative online survey in Portugal (N=1300) where we explored how young people reach their notion of the world. The survey reflected the existence of several nationalities, such as Angolan, Cape Verdeans, Mozambican and Brazilian (official Portuguese-speaking countries), and also Ukrainian. It also included two open research questions about how respondents build their views of the world and how they see the future of news. In this presentation, we will rely on these identified nationalities and their answers to these questions. Data points to the envision that technology will continue to have a paramount sophistication and intervention in the production of news in the coming future (they predict evolutions such as a futuristic technology in the form of an intraocular device for searching news), but they also reveal negative feelings towards the speed at which information is produced and circulates, opening way for the increasing of manipulative, and untrusty information production (they claim for more trustworthy news while at the same time they see a pathway for the news that has no salvation).