Kid Screen, one of the most important conferences on media education in Europe, is organized by the Cinema & Multimedia Office at the Lombardy Region's General Division for Cultures, Identities and Autonomies in co-operation with ECFA. More than 50 experts from all over Europe and about 100 teachers from the Lombardy region had a three-day-programme full of presentations, workshops and discussions, perfectly arranged by the organizing committee directed by Eva Schwarzwald, who is both an ECFA-board member and director of the Cinema and Multimedia Office. The following conclusions have been drawn by Domenico Lucchini, president of ECFA, at the end of the seminar.

It is not easy to draw conclusions from a seminar that was composed of varied contributions, often differentiated between the theory and the practice of communication and creativity. In a freely creative game I will try to navigate between the different subjects which we have identified:

• the spectator in the third millennium;
• helping young people to express themselves;
• exploring art and communication;
• realizing diversity;
• cinema: a passion that can be passed on to young people;
• the threshold of new media.

Then, I will formulate some ideas, working out designs which might help us understand how much of the children's behaviour is original and how much is guided within the creative end results that, today more than ever, are taken from media and technology.

Children as Masters of the Situation
We started from a prerequisite that it is urgent and fundamental that educators and trainers should be conscious of the necessity of offering "good products" within this creativity. Conscious that new theories have modified communication and that younger generations will be living or are already living the socialization and integration of cultures. Relationships, know-how, training and cultural identity already need and will always need more new communicative models. Thus when we speak about "techno-psychology" of the contemporary generations, Derrick de Kerckhove has told us that children of the third millennium, for example, do not watch television but play with it, that they control the images and not vice versa, that they are part of the responsibility for what happens on the different networks. Whether it is television or internet they are always the masters of the situation. Thus it is no longer a question of a passive consuming boy who is a cause of anxiety for parents and for schools. The children turn and flip the screen around as if it were a website until it becomes an extension of their minds instead of being extensions of the reality constructed on the screen around them.

A conclusion which Tony Charlton has also come to, (through other methodologies and approaches) in his "statistical" considerations of the ways in which children of a small community interact and communicate during free play, safeguarding the attention focussed on the influence of television and how it is perceived. His conclusions do not seem to support the studies that demonstrate how children become more anti-social after having watched television. The influence of families and community are considered to be more persuasive in the training of children's behaviour than the simple exposure to television. Thus, it seems that wherever the environment pays attention to behaviour, the potential for television's negative influence is diminished; an effect that can be forwarded by other researchers like Leen van Wichelen (a producer from Belgium) in her television show "My Opinion".

It may take some effort on our part, because we, as adults, still resist seeing a "philosophical device" (coined by McLuhan) on the little screen, (the television, but even the computer or the video game), and we have to take the opportunity that this little screen provides us with, to rethink about ourselves, our relationship to reality and the process symbolizing the possibilities of our discussions with children.

The interactive Spectator
To summarize when we stay with "good" multimedia (that means at an elevated level of interactivity) the young user can be put in a position to interact with sounds as well as fixed or moving images, manipulating and reorganizing their composition with the possibility of "writing" sounds and images. This has been shown by all contributions to the discussion and the concrete analysis of the interactive spectator, of how juvenile creativity expresses itself through the use of media, understood as vehicles of values and of positive behaviour. I am thinking of using videos as demonstrated in the reflections on the potential of democratization of these new technologies by Issy Harvey or Mia Lindrup with her description of national Norwegian projects. The aim of these projects is to stimulate youth in understanding and expressing themselves through audio-visual media, and has also been confirmed by different Italian experiences: videos on the nature of art by Studio Azzurro, projects with interactive CD-ROMs like those from the authors of S.G.A.M.O. and the multi-media project "Glances in Hearing" by the cine-video school produced by the district of Lombardia.

We have to put our own Prejudices into the Game!
Here the child and the teenager, and why not the adult, put themselves into the game. The multimediality (always the good one) puts you into the game and with you, your vision of the world; it draws your inner world from the world of knowledge. The child merges into the situation, projects himself into it, lives it and by doing it develops an understanding of the tactile, empirical type, a vocal intelligence which enables him to proceed by the integration of the elements, by association, and by trial and error.

Even the computer, as demonstrated by the initiatives of Digital Kids, shows us that this concrete, manipulated, vocal, fluid intelligence (always quoting McLuhan) is a communicative possibility, which, if respectful of the child's rights as El St. John has proven, can promote and completely form the child's personality.

A heritage to be protected in the adult, the same adult who, learning from the child in a paradoxical reversing of roles between master and pupil, shares with him an intimate relationship with the multimedia machine. This relationship can restore the capacities to associate, to integrate, briefly, to interweave and thus screen continuously his stand point and his duties. All of us, and in particular those of us who are responsible for training children and youth, will have to put our own prejudices into the game and thus make us accessible to these forms of flexible thinking that break through the lines and emerge from the patterns.

A difficult journey for us adults, which implies first of all, a different psychological attitude, a perceptive decentralization emerging from one's own stand point in order to adopt another, to look at reality from different angles and in a multiperspective way, to travel virtually around the world.

The Cinema is an Archive of Creativity
The new media are places of fluctuation, the net is an experience of de-localization, as has been confirmed by Giorgio Simonelli in his contribution to the discussion on cinema as an archive for the creativity of youth. It ends up in the cinema itself and how could it be otherwise, as the author of these lines is the president of the ECFA.

I find some reassurance in the fact that when expressing themselves on cinema in its specifics, each speaker, and especially Ginette Dislaire, Anna Sola and Giorgio Simonelli, consider that it is possible to construct strong identities and at the same time a collective vision through cinema, understood as a big repertoire and archive, and its history. The possibility of transcending the individual dimension of the analysis to reach the collective one, can emerge from the dialogue between personal experiences. Cinema offers to teachers, educators and social workers a product that is capable of stimulating reflections around the great nuclei of identity and diversity, by scratching the surface and transcending the frame of the screen.

Domenico Luchini

Translated by Hans-Friedrich Kraa with help from Jo-Anne Blouin (Thanks a lot!)

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