Digital belongingness

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Dear parent. Next time when you are about to admonish your child for spending too much of his or her time on YouTube videos or on Facebook, Twitter and other online social media, maybe you should stop for a second and consider if such websites are actually having a positive effect on your child.

According to a new study from the University of Washington, it has been revealed that digital media does help teens mature and develop a sense of belonging, especially with avenues to share their feelings and vent personal problems. It comes as no surprise that near-constant digital activity does have an impact on every youth’s mental and social development.
Published on the university’s website, the study was undertaken by Katie Davis, an expert on digital media use during adolescence. She terms the phenomenon as ‘Friendship 2.0.’ “What they’re doing is different from what the generations of teenagers did before the digital era, but it comes from the same place of basic developmental needs. It’s just that they’re using different tools to satisfy these needs,” said Davis.
Digital media today has made it easy for people across a wide section to create a sense of identity for themselves, which is an important factor in psychological well-being.
The survey was conducted after interviewing 32 adolescents, a mix of boys and girls between ages 13 to 18 in Bermuda. The study showed that almost all of them owned cellphones, with half of them having Internet, and Facebook and YouTube were the two most visited websites, followed by instant messaging services such as Gtalk and Skype, and Twitter.
Interesting finds from the survey included teens indulging in casual chatter about what they did that day, three times more than intimate and intense conversations about feelings, and also posting photos and then tagging their friends, allowing them to to promote a sense of belonging to a circle of friends. Digital media was made use by teens who are shy or quiet, as they find it easier to share their personal thoughts online than in person.
But the study also raised questions about whether this dependence on digital connectivity might affect the development of an autonomous sense of self. “Relying on others for self-affirmation suggests a relatively fragile sense of self, but what we can say is that adolescents are using digital media to promote their sense of belonging and self-disclosure of personal problems, two important peer processes that support identity development,” said Katie Davis in the published study.