Plugged In

by Patti M Valkenburg

  Given the increasing preponderance of digital games, it is unsurprising that the last few years have seen a deluge of research on the prevalence of game addiction as well as the identity of the addicts.50 Data from 2014 indicate that approximately 5 percent of adolescents (ages 13–19) meet five or more of the nine criteria for game addiction and thus can be classified as gaming addicts. These estimates are up somewhat from 2009, when 4 percent of adolescents were classified as game addicts. This increase can be explained in part by an increase in gaming addiction among girls. The study conducted in 2009 showed that virtually no girls were addicted to gaming, while 4 percent of girls were found to be gaming addicts in 2014.51 This increase may have to do with the emergence of game genres that are just as attractive to girls and women as they are to boys and men.

  Table 12.3. Criteria for Internet gaming disorder

  Criterion

  In the past year . . .

  Preoccupation

  have there been periods when all you could think of was the moment that you could play a game?

  Tolerance

  have you felt unsatisfied because you wanted to play more?

  Withdrawal

  have you felt miserable when you were unable to play a game?

  Persistence

  were you unable to reduce your time spent playing games after others had repeatedly told you to play less?

  Escape

  have you played games so that you would not have to think about annoying things?

  Problems

  have you had arguments with others about the consequences of your gaming behavior?

  Deception

  have you hidden the time you spend on games from others?

  Displacement

  have you lost interest in hobbies or other activities because gaming was all you wanted to do?

  Conflict

  have you experienced serious conflicts with family, friends, or partners because of gaming?

  Source: Jeroen S. Lemmens, Patti M. Valkenburg, and Douglas A. Gentile, “The Internet Gaming Disorder Scale,” Psychological Assessment 27, no. 2 (2015).

  Interestingly, while gaming has many positive social effects on children and teens, many of these social benefits decrease or even reverse when gaming becomes pathological. In a longitudinal study of Dutch teens, researchers demonstrated that lonely teens more readily become pathological gamers and that this pathological gaming behavior exacerbated their loneliness.52 In other words, these pathological gamers fit the stereotype of lonesome nerds with no offline friends. Similar work in Singapore found that children who had lower social competence and greater impulsivity were more likely to become game addicts. And this addiction subsequently led to increased depression, anxiety, and social phobias (as well as decreased school performance).53

  Conclusion

  As digital media increase in their portability and accessibility, they will continue to become an inextricable part of the lives of young people. Along with this, the audience for these games will be increasingly filled with both males and females of all ages. This trend is not surprising. Youth have been playing games since the dawn of time, and although games are increasingly moving to the digital realm, youth’s desires and motivations for gameplay have not changed that much. They continue to look to games as a way to fulfill their need for competition, to surmount challenges, to obtain control, and to engage socially with others.

  The question, then, is not why youth (and adults) play games, but whether we should be concerned about the effects of gameplay. As the research discussed in this chapter suggests, gaming is generally a healthy activity for youth. Gamers seem to have a larger working memory, better spatial skills, and improved familial and peer relationships. Moreover, when used in the classroom, gaming is related to deeper learning, particularly when used in combination with traditional instruction by a teacher. Additionally, playing exergames is linked with healthier physical well-being among youth, particularly when played in cooperative situations. Overall, today’s games go far beyond Pac-Man, a rather straightforward test of hand-eye coordination. They revolve around creativity, perseverance, patience, pattern recognition, and complex problem solving—skills that are expected to be crucial for twenty-first-century success.

  Yet the promise of gaming comes with important concerns that should not be disregarded. Extensive sedentary gaming has been linked with physical problems. Moreover, some children and adolescents can become aggressive and agitated from violent gameplay (see chapter 7), and others, particularly lonely teens, can become pathological gamers and, as a result, experience physical and social-emotional problems. In other words, many of the games that can result in positive effects can also lead to troublesome outcomes. This paradox is a challenging one—do we encourage gaming or not?

  As with other media effects, the answer should lie in a combination of understanding the child, the game content, and the social context of gameplay. As discussed in chapter 7, not all violent games make all children violent. Similarly, only a small minority of teens are prone to gaming addiction. And for both aggression and addiction, certain risk factors can increase susceptibility to these effects. As we have highlighted throughout this book, the effects of media (including games) depend on a variety of dispositional, developmental, and environmental factors.

  In all, it seems reasonable to conclude that for the majority of children and teens, gaming can play a positive role in their physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development. A minority of them may be susceptible to the negative effects of gameplay—and for these children and teens, we need research that helps identify who they are and how we can prevent or mitigate negative effects early on.

  13

  SOCIAL MEDIA

  It has only been five years or so that I have noticed that people, and young people in particular, seem to have two faces: a private face that reveals how they really feel, and a public face, which they use to present themselves to the outside world and bring to perfection on YouTube and Facebook. Only it seems like this public face is becoming increasingly important, as if putting it on has become an instinct; almost like an evolutionary development that enables people to survive in today’s society.

  —Rineke Dijkstra (2010)

  Never before have youth had so many opportunities to bring their self-presentation to perfection. They can, for example, endlessly edit their digital profiles and selfies before they post them on the Web or send them to friends. Does this ability make them more self-aware, as the photographer Rineke Dijkstra observes? Or does it turn them into narcissists? In recent years, a great variety of social media has seen the light of day in rapid-fire succession. Even a juggernaut like Facebook must do its utmost to ensure that it does not lose its young users to emerging apps such as Snapchat and Instagram. These developments raise a great many questions. Does the use of social media lead to superficial relationships and loneliness—or does it boost self-esteem and social skills? What effects does extensive media multitasking have on youth? Does it make them lose their ability to concentrate and contemplate? In this chapter, we present the latest scientific research on the role of social media in teens’ lives.

  The Smartphone Generation

  With the increasing affordability of smartphones, we are witnessing a dramatic change in how youth access and use media technologies and content. Nearly 75 percent of American teens ages 13–17 have or had access to a smartphone.1 Data across seven European countries (the UK, Denmark, Italy, Romania, Ireland, Portugal, and Belgium) have similarly demonstrated the quick penetration of smartphones among teenagers.2 And this growth is not limited to the teen audience. In 2011, global smartphone penetration per capita was 10 percent; in 2018, it will reach 37 percent.3 These figures demonstrate that in just ten years, from 2006 to 2016, the smartphone has penetrated virtually all strata of global societies. This speed of penetration by a new technology is unprecedented. The telephone, for example, took nearly seventy years to reach the same rate of penetratio
n, while the Internet took nearly sixteen years.

  The breakthrough of the smartphone to the wide public began with the BlackBerry Pearl in 2006, which was followed by the iPhone 2G in 2007—which soon became the fastest-selling gadget in history. Today, smartphones appear in every aspect of daily life. More than any other media device, smartphones are inextricably linked with the use of social media (media with which users share information with one another through text, audio, photos, videos, or blogs). The portability, power, and connectivity of the smartphone have resulted in a generation of youth (and adults) that are truly “phono sapiens.”4 Indeed, it seems that Steve Jobs’s hyperbolic statement upon introducing the iPhone in 2007 (“This will change everything”) was not all that hyperbolic.

  In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice, “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” The analogy of this statement to today’s social media landscape is compelling. In the world of social media, everything is rapidly new and rapidly old. One of the dangers that this poses is that the usage data in a book are long outdated before it is published. In this chapter, we have included the latest data available. Nevertheless, while writing this chapter, we saw new apps looming on the horizon. Indeed, authors of academic books often try to avoid including social media usage percentages, or they apologize for referring to outdated apps and services, as danah boyd did in It’s Complicated (2014): “Social media is a moving landscape; many of the services that I reference throughout this book may or may not survive. But the ability to navigate one’s social relationships, communicate asynchronously, and search for information online is here to stay. Don’t let my reference to outdated services distract you from the arguments in this book.”5

  Like boyd, we may refer to research on social media that are no longer in existence, or to websites that, by the time this book is published, no longer exist. Nonetheless, the findings of these studies still have relevance. Specific sites and services change continually, but the possibilities for social interactions remain the same. Their transience requires us to discuss social media at a higher, somewhat abstract level. This is what many social media researchers have begun to do by looking not at social media platforms per se, but instead at the more general affordances of social media.

  The Seven Affordances of Social Media

  Coined in 1979, the concept of affordance is used to describe the possibilities that objects in our environment offer us.6 The affordance of a chair, for instance, is that you can sit on it. Of course, you can also use a chair for other purposes, for instance, as a step to get something from a top shelf or as a place to rest your feet. But those are unintended affordances—possibilities observed or selected by a user, but not intended by the designer. In recent years, the affordance concept has turned up in communication research. Here, affordances are the possibilities that (social) media offer their users. An affordance of social media, for example, is that we can be reached at any place and at any time. Affordances are important, since—as we will demonstrate—they help explain the enormous appeal of social media as well as their effects. Social media are characterized by at least seven affordances that are relevant to adolescents’ developmentally induced needs. These are summarized in table 13.1.7

  Table 13.1. Affordances of social media that may enhance teens’ perceived control

  Affordance

  The possibility for users to . . .

  Asynchronicity

  communicate when it suits them, in real time (synchronously) or delayed (asynchronously)

  Identifiability

  decide to which degree content is anonymous or linked to their true identity

  Cue manageability

  show or hide visual or auditory cues about the self while communicating

  Accessibility

  easily find information and contact other persons

  Scalability

  choose the size and the nature of their audience

  Replicability

  copy or share existing online content

  Retrievability

  store and later retrieve posted content

  Source: danah boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications,” in A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2010); Jochen Peter and Patti M. Valkenburg, “The Effects of Internet Communication on Adolescents’ Psychological Development,” in The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies: Media Psychology / Media Effects, ed. Erica Scharrer (San Francisco: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

  The appeal of social media for adolescents can, in part, be explained through one or more of these affordances. But to understand how these affordances may explain this appeal, it is important to recall the specific developmental needs of adolescence. As discussed in chapter 6, the key objective in adolescence is the development of autonomy—the capacity to independently make decisions and act on the basis of what is deemed personally important or useful. To attain autonomy, adolescents must first form a stable identity (a clear idea of who they are and who they want to become). Additionally, they must develop the ability to experience and share intimacy and, therefore, the skills required to form friendships and relationships. And finally, they must discover who they are sexually; that is, they must learn what their sexual identity is, how to control their sexual desires, and how to maintain healthy sexual relationships.

  To successfully complete these huge tasks, adolescents have to learn two communication skills: self-presentation and self-disclosure. Self-presentation is the presenting of aspects of identity within the normative standards of a certain audience. Self-disclosure is the sharing of intimate information, also according to the normative standards within a certain group. Adolescents should, for example, not reveal too much about themselves during initial conversations, but not be tight lipped either. Too much or too little self-disclosure hinders the formation and maintenance of friendships and other social relationships.8

  Self-presentation and self-disclosure require practice. Through self-presentation, adolescents practice certain roles in front of a varying audience. By using the feedback that they receive on their self-presentation, they are able to validate their beliefs and behavior and to integrate them in their identity. Similarly, practice in self-disclosure helps them determine what is correct and appropriate within contexts and groups. Appropriate self-disclosure enhances the forming of close friendships and romantic relationships. This happens through the norm of reciprocity: if one party tells something personal, the other is inclined to tell something personal in return. This reciprocal, tentative exchange of increasingly personal information forms the basis of intimate friendships and romantic relationships.9

  While previous generations of teens acquired dexterity in self-presentation and self-disclosure primarily offline, the smartphone generation prefers to rely on social media to help with the development of these skills. In fact, one in three adolescents prefers to talk through social media rather than face-to-face when it comes to love, sexuality, and things that embarrass them.10 Moreover, recent American data indicate that the vast majority of teens indicate that social media helps them feel more connected with their friends’ feelings and daily lives.11

  What might explain why adolescents strongly prefer to communicate via social media, even about intimate matters? In short, this preference is due to the affordances of social media, which give adolescents an enhanced sense of control—or, more accurately, the illusion of control.12 The affordances give them the impression that they are able to determine with whom, how, and when they interact, and whether they should or should not reveal their identity. This sense of control, in turn, makes them feel more secure and self-assured on social media than in offline situations. And this sense of control is particularly important in adolescence, because adolescents, on their way toward autonomy, can feel uncertain about numerous things.

  How d
o the affordances of social media give teens a sense of control and security? This is best explained via theories about privacy. A sense of control and security is central to virtually all definitions of privacy. When we read about social media and privacy in the newspapers, it is mostly about issues such as privacy settings or the misuse of personal information. Such reports, however, deal only with one form of privacy: informational privacy. Informational privacy describes the extent to which people can control the amount and content of their personal information that is being distributed.13 Contrary to what some believe, most teens are well aware of the dangers that social media pose to their informational privacy.14

  Why, then, do teens (and adults) keep posting all sorts of information about themselves on social media that form a threat to their privacy? This contradictory behavior is referred to as the privacy paradox: just like adults, most teens know perfectly well that social media threaten their privacy, and they are often uncomfortable with it, but do not act accordingly. The privacy paradox is best understood when one accepts a broad definition of privacy. In our view, the privacy paradox focuses too much on informational privacy when there is another type of privacy that may better explain teens’ (and adults’) online behavior. That form of privacy is referred to as psychological privacy—our possibility to control when, what, to whom, and how we share something about ourselves.15