Friendships and Connectedness
In 1998, newspaper headlines around the world were quick to highlight the results of one of the first studies on Internet use and friendships. The study, conducted by Robert Kraut and colleagues, indicated that Internet users (teens and adults) had fewer social bonds and were lonelier than nonusers. To explain their results, the researchers suggested that the time spent communicating online was displacing time that would have otherwise been spent with friends offline. As a result, the quality of offline friendships decreased and Internet users became lonelier.43 The negative findings by Kraut and colleagues were replicated in several other studies in the late nineties.44
These first negative results fit well with the state of Internet access at the time. In those days, it was impossible to maintain existing contacts through the Internet, because very few of those contacts were online. In one of the studies, only 11 percent of the adolescents had Internet access. This meant that their online contacts were for the most part separate from their offline contacts. Online communication in those days was limited to chatting in anonymous chat rooms or newsgroups. It is therefore not surprising that Kraut and colleagues found negative effects of loneliness, since online communication at the time was mostly with strangers, appealing to people who lacked something in their offline environment.
Today, that situation is completely different. Since the rise of Web 2.0, virtually everyone is online. Displacement effects are less likely to occur, because adolescents have significantly more opportunities than before to maintain their existing relationships through social media. Moreover, newer social media applications encourage users to communicate with their existing friends, and that is what teens most typically use them for. Unsurprisingly, recent studies into the effects of online communication have found that online communication leads to increased (rather than decreased) social involvement.45
What might explain these positive results? Why might social media be linked with improved social relationships? Longitudinal research suggests that social media invite adolescents to share intimate feelings with their offline friends, for instance, about love, sex, and things they would be somewhat embarrassed to discuss offline. This is due to the affordances of social media, which, as discussed, foster teens’ perception of social and psychological privacy. Just like offline self-disclosure, online self-disclosure between friends engenders closeness and intimacy, and eventually strengthens friendships. By disclosing something personal to a friend, we invite the friend to share something personal with us. This mutual and gradually more intimate self-disclosure is how friendships and romantic relationships are formed and maintained. It seems that especially for teens, this norm of reciprocity takes place online as well as offline.46
Cyberbullying
While it seems that social media use can play a healthy role in teens’ social and emotional development, there are some important caveats to these findings. One particular problem is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying takes place when online applications are used to insult, exclude, or in any other way hurt others. As with offline bullying, cyberbullying is not an incidental, one-time attack, but comprises purposeful and repeated aggressive actions by individuals or groups, against which the victims cannot easily defend themselves.
There are numerous estimates of the proportion of adolescents who have been cyberbullied; figures range from 1 percent to 53 percent. This wide variation is mainly due to differences in the definitions of cyberbullying. When adolescents are asked whether they have “ever” received a nasty message, the researchers (unsurprisingly) find a higher prevalence than when adolescents are asked whether they have received such a message in the past month. Cyberbullying is about repeated forms of online aggression against victims who are unable to defend themselves. If we base our estimates on this definition, cyberbullying is found far less frequently. In a large-scale study by Sonia Livingstone and colleagues, which included participants from twenty-five EU countries, 6 percent of the nine- to sixteen-year-olds reported that they had been bullied on the computer, and 3 percent on their mobile phone, whereas 13 percent stated that they had been bullied offline (see figure 13.1).47
Figure 13.1. About 9 percent of teens, boys and girls, report having been bullied online in the past year. (ClarkandCompany/iStock)
Cyberbullying occurs particularly often between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, and although boys, in general, bully more than girls do offline, boys and girls seem to have an equal share in online bullying. If differences are found, it is the girls who cyberbully the most. And despite worries that cyberbullying has increased with the mass use of smartphones, its prevalence seems to have remained relatively stable—continuing to occur less frequently than offline bullying.48
Cyberbullying is a troubling and undesired side effect of the affordances of the social media. The affordances lead to an increased chance of engaging in uninhibited behavior, and of the impact of that behavior being less visible. They afford greater ease in distributing bullying communications and enhance their visibility among a wider audience. And they enhance the permanence and indelibility of such communications.49 Perhaps not surprisingly, online and offline bullying are correlated. This means that children and teens who are bullied online more often become victims of offline bullying. Both types of bullying go together with the same problems, such as social anxiety and depression. Efforts to help prevent cyberbullying and counter its effects continue to be an important area for research and public policy.
Sexual Self-Exploration
Besides influencing the development of identity and intimacy, the affordances of social media affect adolescents’ sexuality. As we saw in chapter 10, adolescents routinely use the Internet to learn about sex and sexual identity. In addition, they routinely use social media to obtain advice about sexual issues or to discuss the moral, emotional, and social aspects of sex. This applies in particular to gay and bisexual adolescents. Homosexuality still cannot be freely discussed in some circles.50 But it is not just gay and bisexual adolescents who are relying on social media to explore their sexuality. More than ever before, increasing numbers of teens are turning to social media as a means of expressing their sexuality. This is particularly evident through two related phenomena: sexting and the sexy selfie.
Along with the rise of smartphone-based social media, sexting has gained wide interest. “Sexting,” a portmanteau word formed from “sex” and “texting,” refers to the sending or posting of sexual messages, photos, or videos via a smartphone or any other electronic device. Studies investigating the prevalence of sexting among teens have yielded mixed results; some suggest prevalence limits as low as 2 percent, and other estimates are closer to 10 percent.51 In general, it seems that sexting occurs more frequently among older adolescents. And while the public often perceives that girls sext more often than boys, this pattern seems to be country dependent, with several studies reporting equal sexting rates for boys and girls.52
Sexting seems primarily motivated by self-presentation. Adolescents sext in order to be found sexy, to get attention, to flirt, and also because they think it is funny.53 There is a consensus that the exchange of sexual information between young couples in love is part of normal sexual development. If, however, this exchange happens online, where it is easily accessible, scalable, replicable, and retrievable, it can become risk behavior. But is it as problematic as is often suggested in popular media? On the one hand, longitudinal research suggests that sexting may precede sexual intercourse in some teens, but it does not predict sexual risk behavior such as having sex with multiple partners or having sex without a condom.54 On the other hand, the negative peer perceptions that can result from sexting warrant concern because such perceptions may subsequently harm teens’ social-emotional health. In particular, girls are judged harshly whether they sext (“slut”) or not (“prude”), while boys typically do not experience such criticism.55
Related to sexting is the more specific phenomenon of the sexy selfie. The
sexy selfie typically consists of sexy poses rather than nude or seminude body displays, which are more typical of sexting (see figure 13.2). Interestingly, sexy selfies have consequences not necessarily for the sender of the pictures but rather for their recipients. Specifically, teens who are exposed to sexy selfies via social media are more likely than teens who are less exposed to such selfies to subsequently initiate sexual behavior.56 The researchers suggest that as a result of repeatedly seeing sexy selfies via social media, teens may start to believe that sexual activity is common in their peer group and may feel increased pressure to engage in sexual activities. Given the relative newness of sexting and the sexy selfie, however, it may take some time before we can conclude whether these phenomena represent normal parts of teens’ sexual development or, instead, indicate maladaptive sexual development and warrant concern.
Stranger Danger
The same social media that provide teens with an opportunity to express their sexuality via sexting and sexy selfies makes them vulnerable to sexual grooming and offline sexual abuse. Sexual grooming occurs when someone approaches a child or a teen with the intent of eventually initiating offline sexual contact. A groomer usually starts by striking up an online friendship, which he (it is generally a man) slowly steers toward offline sexual abuse. Whenever there is a case of grooming, the press covers it extensively. Nonetheless, although grooming is among the most highly reported online sexual allegations, research in several countries has demonstrated that its prevalence in these countries is low.57 Sexual abuse is still committed more often by offline acquaintances than online strangers.
Figure 13.2. Repeated exposure to “sexy selfies” can stimulate sexual initiation among teens. (Corbis)
The teens who are the most vulnerable to grooming are girls and gay boys. Furthermore, teens who are uncertain about their sexual identity, who were abused as children, and who have already demonstrated offline risk behavior are also particularly vulnerable. Although estimates vary by country, an EU Kids Online report found that 30 percent of children and adolescents have made contact “in the past twelve months” with a person whom they knew only from the Internet.58 Nine percent of these respondents arranged a face-to-face meeting with these “strangers,” who, in most cases, turned out not to be strangers, but friends of friends. One percent of them looked back on the offline meeting with an unknown person as an unpleasant experience. Although 1 percent is a small proportion, we of course should take it very seriously. Such experiences may have very painful or even tragic consequences for children and teens. It is also important to recognize that it can be very difficult for children and teens to properly gauge when online contacts pose a threat, because groomers generally use extremely complex and sophisticated tactics. Here is an important task for educators—identifying ways to make youth aware of these dangers and ensuring that they are sufficiently “social media literate” when it comes to interacting with unknown others.
Cognitive Effects of Social Media
While researchers initially paid attention mainly to the social-emotional consequences of social media for teens, there has been a recent influx of research on their cognitive consequences. The affordances of Web 2.0 services—particularly their ever-extending accessibility—has led researchers to ask about the potential effects of social-media-driven media multitasking on adolescents’ cognitive skills. Along with these concerns have come heated debates about whether youth (and adults) are becoming dumber and experiencing “digital dementia” as a result of a world that increasingly relies on bite-size chunks of information.
Media Multitasking
A deluge of studies since 2010 have looked at the impact of media multitasking—using multiple media at the same time. Media multitasking has increased markedly since the advent of Web 2.0. In the 1990s, 16 percent of adolescents used different media at the same time. The percentage today is almost double.59 With media literally in the palms of many teenagers, these estimates are hardly shocking. Although most media multitasking occurs when teens read and simultaneously listen to music, the combination of watching television and using social media plays a close second. It has become quite common for teens (and adults) to watch television on one screen while simultaneously using social media to comment on the program, dodge the commercials, or stay in touch with friends and other viewers.
There are two main explanations for the dramatic uptick in media multitasking. First, changes in the traditional media landscape increasingly call on media consumers to be able to multitask while consuming the content. Take, for example, gaming. For most of today’s games, successful gameplay requires the gamer to multitask—to keep an eye on all sorts of visual information at the same time. Similarly, many of today’s television programs assume some level of multitasking. On news programs, banners carrying headlines or summaries scroll at the bottom or on the side of the screen as the announcer gives information about a separate, often unrelated story. More than ever before, designers are creating products that challenge us to divide our attention.
Related to this is the second, more important explanation for the meteoric rise in media multitasking: the smartphone. Smartphones accustom us to ingest what Wired magazine calls “fast entertainment”—the continuous stream of bite-size entertainment that comes our way through Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. This steady flow of images, videos, music, and words, particularly when delivered to our palms instantaneously, is said to capitalize on our collective need to quickly consume great quantities of entertainment and information.60
One of the growing concerns about this “fast entertainment” world is that as youth become acculturated to the continual switching of activities and attention, they will eventually lose the ability to concentrate. Research on this topic has usually focused on whether media multitasking can alter our cognitive control. “Cognitive control” is an umbrella term for the mental processes that relate to result-focused behavior, such as paying sustained attention to relevant information, ignoring irrelevant information while concentrating (response inhibition), efficiently switching between tasks (task switching), and storing task-relevant information in working memory. We need cognitive control for virtually any task that requires focus and concentration, and so the threat of decreased cognitive control is worrisome.
Several studies on the relationship between youths’ (and young adults’) media multitasking and cognitive control have looked at different aspects of cognitive control. Meta-analytic research by Winneke van der Schuur and colleagues reveals that media multitasking is negatively related to sustained attention, which implies that teens who more often engage in media multitasking are less able to concentrate on relevant tasks.61 Media multitasking was unrelated to other aspects of cognitive control, including response inhibition, task switching, and working-memory capacity. In fact, one study found that fervid media multitaskers switch between tasks more efficiently than their less ardent counterparts.62 This result makes sense. Media multitaskers continually switch between tasks when they multitask, so they have the opportunity to practice task switching.
There are, however, important limitations to most of the research published thus far in this area. The meta-analysis of van der Schuur and colleagues noted that the majority of work to date has relied on a correlational design. This means that it cannot rule out the reverse explanation, namely, that teens who are less able to concentrate are inclined to multitask more often. As is often the case in media effects research, a reciprocal relationship may be at work: adolescents who cannot focus properly on certain tasks are more likely to increase their media multitasking, which in turn worsens their ability to focus.
It is also important to note that the relationships that have been found are statistically small—suggesting that they do not hold true for all adolescents. It remains unclear, however, for whom these findings are most applicable. None of the existing studies have established which adolescents media-multitask more (or less), or which adolescents are more (or less) susceptible to
the negative effects of media multitasking. There are great individual differences in this respect, and sorting them out should be a priority—an undeveloped land for follow-up research.
“Shallow” Thinking and Digital Dementia
Popular books such as The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain (2011), by Nicholas Carr, have increased interest in whether social media can harm our capacity for concentration and contemplation as well as our ability to store and recall information. Such books often argue that by continually reading snack news and being distracted by the pop-ups and alerts of smartphone apps (for example, a like on Facebook, a retweet on Twitter), we are losing our capacity to focus and think deeply. As Carr noted:
What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
. . . When I mention my troubles with reading to friends, many say they’re suffering from similar afflictions. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they’re becoming chronic scatterbrains.63
Another assumption in books such as Carr’s is that the great accessibility of digital information is making us mentally lazy. In an increasingly Google-able world, we no longer need make an effort to store information in our memories. The Internet has, as it were, become our external memory, and thus we no longer need to train our own. As a result, our own memory functions will decline over time. This process of memory deterioration has been termed “digital dementia” by the German psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer: “The brain shrivels up because it is no longer tapped. Stress destroys brain cells, and newly grown brain cells do not survive, as they are not being used. Digital dementia is, in essence, an increasing inability to fully use, and control, intellectual performance.”64
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