Internet support groups provide forums where generosity and compassion are encouraged to flourish. Emerging adults with concealable stigmas such as drug addictions or hidden sexual preferences can create therapeutic bonds with others who are struggling with similar issues. In the process, they can find self-acceptance, affirmation and validation. Over time, as a result of such positive cyber-interactions, some emerging adults may elect to end secrecy in their non-virtual lives. They may choose to “come out” or to discuss personal issues more honestly with loved ones.8 Interestingly, many of us seem to be quite self-conscious about behaving compassionately in person. The Internet can offer us an avenue for this type of expression. In an anonymous, non-judgmental arena designed to encourage us to share our inner lives, our altruistic selves can emerge and thrive.
The sharing of free information is another altruistic phenomenon that is widespread in cyberspace. Look for help with virtually any topic and you will probably find it online, often free of charge. The fact that so many individuals work so hard, without pay, to provide advice and other valuable resources to complete strangers is a strong argument against Darwinian selfishness. In the anonymity of cyberspace, it seems, the selfless and generous side of human nature quietly flourishes. One could easily argue that acts of altruism greatly outnumber acts of aggression online. Your emerging adult may turn out to be less cynical about human nature, due in large part to the atmosphere of open generosity he or she encounters online on a daily basis.
Computer-mediated communication provides us with access to a much larger world, rich with resources and a wide array of possibilities to engage with others in new and creative ways. Although it is neither inherently “good” nor “bad,” computer-mediated communication can be used as a positive or negative force. Online we display both our best and worst possible selves. Both altruistic and aggressive behaviors are more easily unleashed. Harnessing and utilizing the power of computer-mediated communication, and rewriting the rules of social behavior that go along with it, will be a major challenge for years to come.
What we may not fully realize is that because our emerging adults are more immersed, and more fluent, in new technologies than we are, they are the ones taking the lead in rewriting those rules. When it comes to communication in the twenty-first century, our kids are teaching us. The rules are being rewritten and we are not doing the rewriting. So while we may be tempted to lecture our emerging adults about what is appropriate behavior with cell phones and e-mails, our opinion, in a very real sense, is quickly becoming irrelevant. As the “owners” and native adopters of the new technologies, our emerging adults may, in fact, know more about what is “appropriate” than we do. Business, commerce and social norms are shifting quickly in their direction, not ours.
With that shift in mind, let’s move forward to two popular platforms among emerging adults: social networking and gaming.
The Facebook Generation: Building Communities
How many friends do you have? Facebook, the most popular social networking site, gives new meaning to the word “friend.” It is not unusual to count over 1,000 friends on Facebook, a site that allows you to have as many as 5,000. On customized pages, individuals display virtual presentations of themselves, including information about their relationships with one another. To a large extent, you are defined by who your friends are. Facebook has over one billion users and is growing. The majority of Facebook users do not belong to the community of college students for whom the site was originally designed.9
The idea of Facebook and other online social networking sites is to dissolve barriers among individuals. In becoming a “friend,” you can instantly learn about the other person, his or her thoughts, feelings and musings, and view personal photographs and other media materials to enhance the experience. Friends “watch over” each other, with the degree and intensity of relationships varying based on need. Facebook is a community with built-in flexibility. It typically includes individuals a member sees every day as well as those they connect with exclusively through the site. You can develop and sustain relationships with much less effort than non-virtual friendships might require. On Facebook, the mosaic of your life is displayed and your various relationships are “worked” and kept alive. It is easy to see how this is very appealing to emerging adults striving to develop a self that feels whole and integrated. Facebook allows you to rewrite your self-concept and essentially broadcast it to the world.
The meaning of community has greatly expanded in this era. Maintaining a virtual community that interfaces seamlessly with one’s non-virtual community has become integral to the lives of many emerging adults. There are no apparent boundary distinctions.
Alice Mathias, former New York Times columnist, and Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times staff writer, provide their own accounts for the popularity of Facebook. Facebook, they point out, enables us to indulge our gazes anonymously; its very existence depends on our ability to “dwell” on others without making our presence known. “Dwelling” online is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to “real” interaction, claims Mathias. We are entranced with this medium, because we are “bored, lustful, socially unfulfilled or generally avoiding real life.”10
Facebook, for some, is a source of entertainment, an escape from day-to-day routines. It affords the viewer an opportunity to watch an evolving narrative unfold. “[We] can turn our lives into stage dramas and relationships into comedy routines,” according to Mathias.11 Similarly, Rosenbloom makes this observation:
I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater…we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.12
Compelling questions swirl around the phenomenon of Facebook and other social networking sites. Is it accurate to assume that the more time we spend communicating online, the less time we will spend talking face-to-face? As we stretch the definition of “friend” to encompass individuals we may never actually meet in person, will the strength of our “face-to-face world” friendships become diluted? Does the time spent on Facebook, an environment that invites casualness and familiarity, discourage us from interacting with others in a more intimate way? We don’t yet know the answers to these questions. Mr. and Mrs. Bee, parents of Amy, a twenty-eight-year-old emerging adult, are searching for their own answers.
Amy is a struggling musician trying to build a career to support her modest lifestyle. She is working at a coffee shop to earn extra money. Her parents encourage her ambitions but harbor an unspoken anxiety about her future. Mr. and Mrs. Bee feel that Amy spends an inordinate amount of time on Facebook, as well as texting friends at all times of the day and night. According to Mr. and Mrs. Bee, Amy seems easily distracted in their presence, “not totally present.” They experience Amy as rude and they are genuinely confused by her behavior. They wonder if it would be wise to talk with Amy about their concerns. Dr. Houser offers his thoughts:
There may be several explanations for Amy’s behavior. Emerging adults are focused on discovering and deepening their relationships, particularly their intimate relationships. With time, they become increasingly interested in developing more permanent, deeper relationships. Amy’s preoccupation with her contacts may be serving this need. Her apparent disconnection from her parents is in sync with the developmental milestone of establishing intimate relationships outside the family.
Technology provides greater access to other emerging adults. Whereas, in the past, emerging adults would need to meet in a mutually-agreed-upon location (e.g., a restaurant), currently there are no such impediments. The concerns raised by Mr. and Mrs. Bee would, in fact, be more worrisome if Amy chose to focus her social energies exclusively on the family. Her Internet activities are within the norm and do not warrant concern at this point.13
The popularity o
f Facebook and other social networking sites suggests that they are meeting the social and emotional needs of emerging adults and, in many cases, of their parents. Perhaps these sites provide a forum for us to feel like members of a larger community. Given the fragmentation we experience in many facets of our lives, this sense of connection may be important. We all need to belong to a community, to be recognized and to be affirmed.
No one is quite sure about the different set of skills needed for interacting with others. One thing parents of emerging adults may fully appreciate, though, is the way that Facebook and other social networking sites are often used to enhance “face-to-face” relationships. For the majority of users, these sites are not substitutes for a social life, but powerful adjuncts to a social life. It is common, for example, for emerging adults to announce face-to-face social gatherings by posting announcements to their “friends” groups. This method has largely replaced phone invitations. Another positive aspect of social networking sites is that most emerging adults do not lose touch with old friends, as our generation and past generations may have done. In cyberspace, they can and do stay in touch with anyone they choose, essentially for life. Thus, they maintain a far greater number of active relationships than their parents ever did. These relationships are “tended” on a regular basis.
In addition, online communities can produce face-to-face friendships. We often hear about the dangers of meeting Internet connections in person, but we don’t hear about the far more common phenomenon of fostering friendships. Jake, one father I spoke to recently, told me about how his emerging adult daughter Penny made a close friend as a result of an online encounter. As a high school student, she had met a kindred spirit on a fan site devoted to a popular Broadway musical. When Penny went to see the show in New York, her cyber-friend (with both parents’ supervision) met her in the city and they struck up an instant chemistry. The two remained friends and when the daughter was ready to start college in New York City, the former cyber-friend helped her get settled and even got her a job. That relationship has deepened and has spun off literally dozens of other mutual relationships.
My colleague Ilana Lehmann and I recently completed a study with 516 college- and non-college-educated emerging adults and their use of Twitter.14 Developed in 2006, Twitter is a social networking tool known as microblogging. It enables users to express themselves and disseminate their views to a large and diverse community. Unlike Facebook, users are limited to one hundred and forty characters and their tweets can be read by followers and other users who are interested in the topic of conversation. Tweeting is one way emerging adults can build social capital and feel connected and validated.
We conducted the study to try to determine in part whether personality differences exist between those emerging adults who elect to tweet and those who do not (measured by the Big Five Personality Inventory, which was developed by Oliver P. John15). Our results suggest that there are no differences in personality between the two groups, with the exception of extraversion. A small but significant difference was found on the extraversion measure. Emerging adult Twitter users scored higher on extraversion. They also reported that they had a greater number of online and face-to-face friends, in comparison to non-users. The size of the social networks of emerging adult Twitter users, not surprisingly, was greater. We found that Twitter users were more likely to meet others face-to-face after connecting with them in cyberspace in comparison to non-users.
The concern that emerging adults have interpersonal skill deficits as a result of over-reliance on technology was not supported in our study. As we discuss later, friendships are very important during this developmental period of emerging adulthood. Emerging adults can use computer-mediated communication such as Twitter to build, enhance and deepen their social communities.
Now let’s turn our focus to another popular platform that may be bewildering and confusing to you—online gaming and “virtual worlds.”
An “Alternate Reality”?
Fantasy online role-playing games have caught on, particularly among emerging adult males. Social structures in such games, unlike those in the brick-and-mortar world, are well defined and allow for players to adopt distinctive new identities. In many games the player is also able to adopt various evolving characteristics, which affect the way he interacts with other characters and the in-game world. Success is defined by fairly traditional markers such as (virtual) wealth and social prestige. A player is deemed skillful if he is successful in killing opponents and conquering their valuables. Men in the emerging adult years are the core consumers.
Typically, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) use simultaneous text-based and graphic communication. Gestures, actions and facial expressions can often say more than words. As with chat rooms and instant messaging systems, the user relates to others anonymously, using only a fictional character name or avatar. Eighty-five percent of MMORPG players are males. Eighty percent of these male players are under the age of thirty, while 50 percent of females are over the age of thirty.16 Females tend to be middle-aged women who stay at home and use the computer as a way of “connecting” to a larger world. The average gamer spends twenty hours a week playing games online, an interesting contrast to the average Internet user who spends only four hours a week online.17
It is unclear whether or not fantasy games encourage the imagination. Some believe “it’s the game designers who mostly flex their imaginations, not the players.”18 Yet some of the most imaginative moments can occur when players try to “break” the game, create their own events or exploit programming “bugs.” In one incident, for example, a player discovered a programming glitch that allowed him to spread a deadly magic spell the same way one might spread a virus. An “epidemic” broke out on one server, which created a major challenge for the game company to solve. Executives were later approached by more than one university interested in using the company’s game data to study how viruses spread in the non-virtual world.
Collaboration certainly seems to be a skill that is taught, or at least reinforced, by games. Groups of players can organize strategically and creatively to accomplish goals that would be difficult or impossible for an individual to achieve alone. The extent to which these collaborative skills translate to the real world is as yet unknown.
What we do know, however, is that fantasy games are extremely time-consuming. Hardcore “gamers,” who are the heaviest users of online games as compared to casual gamers and non-users, tend to be those who are least fulfilled in their face-to-face relationships. To put things in perspective, Internet use is generally considered problematic when it exceeds twenty hours per week. It is not uncommon nowadays for therapists to see clients who report serious “addiction.” As the use of online games increases, social anxiety may become more evident among users.
Using the term “non-virtual” rather than “real” when describing face-to-face relationships is actually preferable to many people under thirty. That’s because online relationships are very “real” to the gamer and the social networker. As a parent of an emerging adult, it is helpful to make a mental shift and view Internet life as “real” for many emerging adults.
But when does virtual reality become too real? What separates a “robust hobby” from an obsession? There are no hard-and-fast answers but we will look at some good indicators in a moment. As is often the case among “addicted” individuals, however, it is family members, not the users themselves, who typically become concerned with “problematic” behavior. It is also typically family members who ask their emerging adult to seek professional help.
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Escape Artists: Travels through the Worlds of Role-Playing Freaks, Online Gaming Geeks, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, asks an important question:
“[I]s this obsession with fantasy heroics a kind of cowardice—a perpetual infantilizing, an inability to take real-life risks that actually [matter]?…I fear a massive cultural failure to fight real battles in a
ctual, not virtual life.”19
Do “virtual world” games leave emerging adult players more dissatisfied with “reality”? Is Gilsdorf right in his concern that the real issue might be “a massive cultural failure to fight real battles in actual, not virtual life”? Are gamers hiding behind avatars in their lonely bedrooms behind closed doors, or is this just a cultural stereotype?
The amount of time spent on these games leaves substantially less opportunity to interact with the non-virtual world. Skills gained in virtual games may or may not generalize to non-virtual interactions. Let’s explore these questions by entering the world of Josh, a twenty-two-year-old emerging adult gamer, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Denoya.
Josh has been a loner most of his life. Although intellectually gifted, he attended college classes sporadically and dropped out after freshman year due to poor grades. Josh spends over twenty hours a week playing a virtual reality game, staying up until all hours of the night. He is currently living at home and seeking employment. He has worked in various jobs, moving restlessly from one to another, either quitting on his own or being fired. When queried about his lifestyle, he responds, “I am trying to find out what I want to do with my life.” His parents are concerned and do not trust that he is telling them the truth about himself and the way he spends his time. They are very worried about his online gaming. Josh rebuffs Mr. and Mrs. Denoya’s requests to be a member of the family, refusing to join them for dinner.
Parenting Your Emerging Adult Page 9