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Nowadays teenagers grow up with social media and various possibilities of digital communication. The offline and online lives of “digital natives” are tightly bound together and for most of them life without Internet is unthinkabe. However, what happens when teenagers do not have access to modern communication facilities and to social media? Do they miss these media? What services and which activities do teenagers miss? We gathered qualitative data from teenagers after three weeks of being completely offline in frames of a long-term adventure education program. We also gathered quantitative data on teenage media use before media withdrawal. 135 teenagers (M=14.47, SD=.56, 52% female) answered our questions within four years (34 teenagers in each of these years - 2018, 2019, 2020 - and 33 teenagers in 2021). After three weeks of complete media withdrawal two thirds of teenagers reported not missing social media or missing them to a minor extent. They described social media services as stressful, disturbing, extremely time-consuming and boredom-related. Several respondents replied that they had enough communication offline and felt good in the community that made online social media superfluous. However, every third teenager reported missing social media. The main reason was the desire to contact the personal social network. A few teenagers reported missing social media as a source of relaxation and an efficient way to “switch-off”. One out of four teenagers (23%) reported missing WhatsApp. One out of ten (11%) mentioned Instagram, but just one half in a context of missing it. WhatsApp and Instagram were also the most popular services among teenagers before withdrawal (94.3% of teenagers reported having a profile in WhatsApp and 73,3% of teenagers reported using Instagram). Only a few teenagers (2.2%) - all boys - mentioned missing YouTube. The article presents further results, discusses perspectives and limitations of the project.

YouTube is one of the most popular online social spaces nowadays combining features of both a huge repository of information and a social networking service. Millions of people use this video-sharing platform daily. Entertainment (sports, comedy, music, movie trailers), information seeking (missed news, product reviews, research on a specific topic), and educational purposes (how-to videos, learning math, or tactics for video games) were discussed as main motivational aspects for watching YouTube videos (Lagger et al. 2017). Usage of YouTube for educational purposes became particularly relevant for teenagers as a support for their home-schooling. Our goal is to find out what strategies teenagers use to find relevant educational content on the service and how important this content was for their everyday learning practices before and during the COVID pandemic. We analyzed online behavior of 34, 14 to 15-year old teenagers (47% male) who took part in a long-term adventure trip with digital media left aside. We gathered quantitative data seven months before the trip (March 2019), just before the trip (October 2019), on the last day of the trip (April 2020), and five months after the trip (September 2020). We also conducted in-depth interviews with nine teenagers, who named YouTube as their favourite online service. Our intention is now to conduct nine additional interviews with the same teenagers to see whether their everyday learning practices changed within the last year. Implications drawn from this study, further research perspectives, and limitations will be presented and discussed.