ABSTRACT
The new media are socio-cultural environments in which people live their everyday experiences, globally and locally situated (Fortunati 2005). They offer not only new ways to connect with other people but also spaces for projects, feelings and imaginations unthinkable before. The approach of cultural psychology used in this chapter provides a strong foundation for exploring this topic based on the concepts of mediation and artifacts. For cultural psychology the advent of the new communication technologies (artifacts) affects, of necessity, the ways people experience reality, create its structure and find its internal boundaries. Using new media in everyday life has enlarged and somehow complicated the ways people have of making sense of the situations in which they find themselves (Mantovani 1996a, 1996b, 2002). Furthermore, the contribution that cultural psychology brings to research on new media is clarified through comparison with the way cross-cultural research views cultures and cultural differences (Berry 1997, 2001).
