DIGITAL SKILLS FROM SILENT TO ALPHA GENERATION: AN OVERVIEW

In recent years, the rapid technological development has completely changed the ways in which people interact and communicate with each other. The new modes of communication allow individuals to interact at high speed and to establish contemporary and instantaneous relationships with more people. This is possible thanks to the technological supports that today, very often, mediate the social interaction between two or more people. Technological development has involved all ages from Silent Generation to Alpha Generation. In this article we want to analyze how the various generations perceive the technological development and how they evaluate the interaction with technologies, after having analyzed the different intrinsic characteristics that identify each person within the generation: the historical period in which they were born, behavior, values, education, job, current situation. The research stems from a question: How do the various generations perceive human-technology interaction? This research question has generated two more questions: do the features of each generation affect the respective perception? Do the digital skills possessed by each generation change perception? Attempts have been made to solve these questions through a literature review within Google Scholar from 2005 to 2019 using the combined search’s terms different generations, technology, human-technology interaction and digital skills. Knowing the digital skills of each generation and the modes of their interaction with technologies allows us to plan interventions, products, concrete actions favouring the centrality of the subject and his/her life’s quality.