The main aim of my presentation is to discuss how young people constitute their lifeworld in social media regarding moral acts, as well as how teachers’ upbringing assignment might has changed due to this development. Changes in society affect the views upon school and the assignments of teachers, but also what competences and abilities young people need to develop to be able to participate in a future democratic society (Durkheim, 1956, Dewey 1916/1999). Young people don’t separate the online and offline world. On the contrary they see one world with various arenas (Bradley, 2005). This means, these arenas affect not only one another, but it leads also to new demands and challenges in teachers’ upbringing assignment.

Our late-modern society is more permeable and fragmented than before. People have to make a whole range of choices, not just about aspects such as appearance and lifestyle, but more broadly about their life destinations and relationships. As a result, modern individuals have to be constantly “self-reflexive,” making decisions about what they should do and who they should be. These changes affects also the view upon moral development; it is less about mastering clear right and wrong answers and more about negotiating different social context (Bauman 1995, 2000, Giddens, 1979). It requires that the pupils reflect on what is right and what is wrong; he/she has to make a considered judgement, a judgement that is partly based on values. Online communication plays a critical role in young people's moral and social development for the face to face-world as well. Parallel the online world creates its own social context and forces young people to coordinate it with traditional social contexts and there emerging sense of morality (Bradley, 2005). The choices you make in social media are important because there is an openness which you can’t find in the same way offline.

This digital development raises many interesting questions and one of them deals with if and in that case in what way young people’s ethical and moral development is affected by these interactions in social media. The main purpose of this study is to put the light on and try to understand how young people’s lifeworld is constructed when the communication takes place in different kinds of social media, concerning moral acts. In my paper, I will relate these changing conditions for young people's moral development to the teachers' upbringing assignment from a didactic perspective.

From my point of view there is a need to develop and promote realistic understandings of pupils and digital technology if teachers are to play meaningful roles in current generations of young people. There is also time to wipe out the divide between the digital immigrant and native as just a post-modern myth. There is a reciprocity in the meeting of pupil-teacher. Pupils may know more about technology itself than teachers, but through their professionalism teachers are important in supporting young people’s moral development irrespective of where it takes place.   

Bauman, Zygmunt (1995). Life in fragemnts: essays in postmodern morality. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity. Camebridge:Polity. boyd, danah (2007). Why youth heart social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. I David. Buckingham (Edt.) Youth, identity, and digital media. Cambridge:MA: MIT Press. Bradley, Karen (2005). Internet lives: Social context and moral domain in adolescent development. In New Directions for Youth Development, (2005)108 Dewey, John. (1916/2004). Democracy and Education. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications. Durkheim, Émile. (1956). Education and sociology. New York: Free Press. Giddens, Anthony. (1979). Central problems in social theory. Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social analysis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen. (1998a). On the pragmatics of communicatino. Cambridge: Mass.; London: MIT. Habermas, Jürgen. (1998b). Between facts and norms: contribution to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge: Mass.; London: MIT.