MIMIc

This project is part of the MIMIc project. Do young people mimic the lifestyles they encounter on their social media feed and in entertainment fiction, such as music or videogames? This question is at the core of the research conducted by the MIMIc team in Belgium, France and Slovenia across 4500 adolescents. The project seeks to learn how young people enrich their lives with the affordances offered by the rich digital media landscape in which they grow up. Moreover, we aim to obtain a better understanding of how youth think and feel about being online all the time, constantly exposed to an unlimited stream of information on how their peers organize their lives on social media, in music, movies, and videogames. To build this knowledge, project MIMIc takes up a multi-method design, meaning that we will: (1) look at the social media profiles of youth and the celebrities and influencers popular among youth, (2) follow a group of youngsters aged 12 to 17 over the course of 1 year to see how they grow-up in a mediated world and (3) monitor young people through daily surveys to better understand what their day-to-day interactions with social media, popular TV shows, music, and videogames entail.