The implantation of the Internet and its appropriation by the young people constantly evolves in the direction of more access. Moreover, new technologies, especially mobile phones, video games and multimedia supports, are growing in popularity and are likely to enable the increasing development of content-rich services. This evolution creates a need for a better information addressed to educators, and, perhaps, a reflection about what is at stake in the educational fields.
There are also qualitative evolutions in "self-education" of the young people with the Internet and new technologies, resulting from their own practices and their mutual exchanges of information and behaviours. It is consequently important to update existing knowledges on the representations, the attitudes and the practices of the Internet and new technologies, by including the use of emerging devices, in the form of light portable audio-scripto-visual media, connected on telecommunication networks. This updating will make possible the elaboration of educational orientations to promote a safer use of those new technologies by young people.
The aim of the Mediappro project is to contribute, by relevant and realistic recommendations, to the education of young people from 12 to 18 in safer practices of the Internet and new portable audio-scripto-visual medias, connected on telecommunication networks. The question of security covers the reception and the spreading of harmful or illegal contents, but also the management, by the young users, of the harmful potential of communication acts, in culturally or ethically discrete contexts. This concerns situations where the differences of culture or ethic bring to the messages or to the actions a harmful power, without the presence of prejudicial intention, on someone. One should say that Mediappro tends to connect the question of safer use to the question of “how to put more civilisation into the new virtual networks”.