Intercultural Collabration Bridge to Decipher Internet Addiction

Background This project aims to initiate a productive dialogue and establish a dynamic network between students, with the ultimate goal of facilitating experience exchange and empowering youth participation in policy-level engagement. Nowadays, there is a popular problem that is blocking dialogue, social networks, and participation of youth which is called internet addiction and problematic technological device usage. The high level of internet usage in Western European countries became today's reality and figures of central and east European countries. All over Europe and the world, individuals spent most of their daily time using the internet and technological device. Internet addiction is neither an individual nor a local problem, but a multifaceted one, which requires complex solutions on an individual, social, and international level. According to that, this project's main aim is to initiate a dialogue and connection between Turkish, French, Lithuanian, and Romanian students, with the ultimate goal of facilitating social dialogue and empowering youth participation in policy-level engagement. Additionally, in this project, we aimed to broaden and asses the field further. Objectives By implementing the project, we wanted to achieve the following objectives: - Identifying the reasons for excessive online behavior (internet and technological devices addiction) among students from France, Turkey (three different cities of Turkey), Lithuania, and Romania. - Letting participants from different countries discuss the identified reasons for internet addiction to reduce the tendency of internet addiction among young people. - Sharing the identified reasons with stakeholders, decision-makers, and politicians. - Fostering a cross-border and sustainable dialogue between project participants on Internet addiction and factors that may have the potential to reduce it. - Developing a set of recommendations on how to decipher and reduce Internet addiction (and sharing recommendations with 250 participants through a brochure). - Bringing 126 students together for the project activities (LTTs). - Reaching more than 30.000 people by placing the visibility materials of the project in universities and social media. Thus, to draw attention to internet addiction and the importance of dialogue in overcoming this problem. Implementation In this project, we realized three main types of activities: A. Learning, Teaching, and Training Activities: We realized three LTT activities. The first LTT was in Paris/ France; focused on the introductory concepts of internet addiction and the potentially related factors of internet addiction. The second meeting was in Mardin / Türkiye; focused on the results of the field study and the creation of possible solutions to decipher internet addiction. The last LTT was in Klaipeda / Lithuania; focused on the implementation of possible solutions and how to integrate these activities into our daily life. B. Transnational Project Meetings: We realized four TPMs, in Eskişehir / Türkiye, Paris / France, Klaipeda / Lithuania, and Constanta / Romania. The main focus of these meetings was to monitor the project process, discuss related topics such as finance, project implementation, conflicts, and problems among partners (if any); and plan future steps of the project. C. Dissemination Activities: We realized several online and face-to-face meetings to introduce the project, disseminate the project progress and raise awareness about internet addiction among university students. Achievements In this project, we achieved almost all of our project objectives. We realized the field study in four different countries, and we used its outcomes during the project and while creating the final project report. We reached the policy level by visiting the representatives, politicians, and local leaders. Our participants engaged in policy-making processes and it fostered youth participation. Our participants were actively contributing to the discussions, solution-making, and implementation processes to decipher internet addiction; it was our youth-for-youth approach. We reached more university students we aimed both directly and indirectly via our social media channels, reports, and bulletins. We published policy recommendations and project process as a report and offered the project as a good practice to reduce internet addiction publicly. Only because of the pandemic and Europe's insecure atmosphere, we did not reach the total number of participants we aimed for the LTT mobilities. Although, it did not prevent us to create social effects and policy-level awareness at the end of the project.