Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Whether at school, at home, or on the go, today’s adolescents are surrounded by digital media such as computers and the Internet, video games, mobile phones, and other handheld devices (Roberts & Foehr, 2008). The writer and game-designer, Marc Prensky, calls them digital natives (Prensky, 2001) – they were born in digital worlds and have lived their entire lives surrounded and immersed within them. Compared to their parents, who tend to be digital immigrants, these digital natives are early adopters of technology, do not need an instruction manual to figure out how to use a cell phone or digital camera, and have no conception of life without Google or Wikipedia.

Remarkably, a majority of young people use these new digital technologies. In 2004, the Kaiser report indicated that 74% of 8- to 18-year olds in the USA had Internet access in their homes (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005). More recently, in 2009, 93% of US children between 12 and 17 were online (Jones & Fox, 2009). Across several countries, young people report similar rates of Internet access. The 2008 World Internet Project survey of 13 countries revealed that among 12- to 14-year-old youth, the percentages of Internet users were 76% in Singapore, 88% in the USA, 98% in Israel, 95% in Canada, 96% in the Czech Republic, and 100% in the UK (Lebo et al., 2009). While young people use the Internet for both informational and communication purposes, the latter uses are especially popular in this demographic group, an issue we address shortly (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2008a). Mobile phones are another technology that has become ubiquitous among adolescents: in market research in the USA, 79% of 13- to 19-year olds reported having a mobile device, and 15% reported having a smart device such as an iPhone or BlackBerry (Harris Interactive, 2008). In the European Union, 50% of 10-year olds, 87% of 13-year olds, and 95% of 16-year olds reported having a mobile phone (Europa Press-Release, 2009).

Digital technologies are undoubtedly popular among adolescents, and just as radio, film, and television before them were treated with suspicion, and seen as corrupting youth, these newer technologies are frequently viewed as having a negative influence on young people. Which new technologies do teens use and what to they do with them? Should we be concerned about their use of these media? Does adolescents’ use of technology help them navigate the challenges of adolescence or does it only complicate matters? Are digital worlds giving rise to new behaviors or are adolescents’ transferring traditional adolescent behaviors onto them? What are some of the opportunities, challenges, and dangers that come with technology use? How can we ensure that young people use technology safely? We tackle some of these questions in this book in order to leave the reader with an understanding of how youth influence and are influenced by newer forms of interactive technologies.

To do this we have to start at the very beginning, and in this chapter, we describe adolescents’ digital worlds. We begin by examining the blurring of the distinction between hardware (e.g., computers, cell phones) and the content (e.g., software such as word processing or online applications like e-mail or instant messaging) that they support. Then we describe the various technologies and online applications used by adolescents, including social networking sites, text messaging, blogs and microblogs, online phoning, online gaming (e.g., Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games such as World of Warcraft), chat rooms, virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life), bulletin boards, and online music and videos. Where available, we draw on usage data from the World Internet ProjectFootnote 1 so the reader can get a sense of both the similarities as well as differences in how adolescents living in different parts of the world use online applications and virtual spaces. Next, we examine some salient aspects of the communication environment inherent to most new media: anonymity and disembodied users, disinhibited behavior, self-disclosure, and multitasking as well as media multitasking. The chapter concludes with the specific goals and organization plan of the book.

Emerging Media: Blurring of the Lines Between Hardware and Content

As we will show in the next sections, adolescents use a variety of hardware tools to find information, access entertainment, play games, and most of all, to interact and communicate with each other. The hardware they use include cell phones, smart mobile devices (e.g., the BlackBerry with multiple capabilities such as browsers, e-mail, navigation tools), iPods, Sidekicks (a mobile device with a Qwerty keyboard), video games (i.e., Nintendo or Xbox), interactive (digital) TV, navigation tools (GPS systems) as well as computers, desktops, and smaller or larger notebooks. In the early years of new media, hardware and the content (software or applications) they supported were largely separate. Thus, the Internet and consequently e-mail or instant messaging were generally accessed via desktops and then laptops, games were the province of game systems, and texting or short-message systems (SMS) were the purview of cell phones. Increasingly, these different hardware can connect to the Internet and we can use them for a variety of capabilities such as to download information (e.g., updating of software), rank players of video games, download video games, play against other (live) players, download music, videos, and television programs, and even listen online to radio broadcasts.

The Internet has now become a network, wherein the previously separate hardware tools are able to come together. Activities that were exclusive to an online PC or notebook can now be performed via cell phones and other smart devices that are also portable as they are getting smaller and smaller (Roberts & Foehr, 2008). The Internet is consequently moving from static places (desks with PCs) into our pockets and adolescents, who tend to be early adopters of technological innovations (Greenfield & Subrahmanyam, 2003), are using them to be “always online,” “always connected,” and some even say “never alone” (C. Nass, personal communication, July 15, 2009). Adolescents are thus able to access e-mails, instant messages, and even their social networking site profiles from their cell phones and smart devices, at home, at school, or while on the move. The type of hardware is less important than the particular type of application and the communication that occurs within it. Reflecting this reality, our descriptions of the various applications in the next sections focus on their function rather than the particular hardware tool/s used to access them.

The World Internet Project

Where relevant, in this chapter, as well as elsewhere in the book, we present results based on data from seven countries that are a part of the World Internet Project (WIP; see http://www.worldinternetproject.net). The WIP is a global international survey on the impact of the Internet on individuals and societies, coordinated by the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. As one of us (David) is responsible for collecting the data from the Czech Republic, we are able to provide this unique international perspective. More than 20 partner countries and regions from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Oceania participated in the survey. Most of the WIP results reported in this book are based on the data from the following seven countries, for which the 2007 sample included a sufficient number of adolescents: the USA, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and China. All samples were representative of the countries from which they were collected, except for the Chinese data, which was only representative of urban areas. The surveys were conducted via the telephone and face-to-face interviews. Table 1.1 presents descriptive information about the samples.

Table 1.1 Descriptive Information about the Samples Drawn from Some of the Countries Participating in the 2007 WIP
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The results we report here are drawn from sub-samples of adolescents up to 18 years of age. The age ranges of the respondents varied and participants were as young as 12 in some countries whereas in others, they were 14, 15, or even 16 years old. Whenever possible, we tested the data from the USA, Canada, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Singapore for age effects. We divided the participants into two groups: younger (12–15 years) and older (16–18 years) adolescents and developmental differences, if found, are reported.

Online Applications and Digital Contexts Used by Adolescents

At the outset, we remind the reader that the online applications and digital spaces described in this section were popular among youth at the time when we wrote this chapter in 2009, and there is no telling how long they are likely to remain so. In addition, we selected these particular applications based on trends in the USA and the Czech Republic as well as our own work in these two countries. Not included in our description are familiar and staple applications, such as e-mail or web sites that most adolescents use.

Figure 1.1 allows us to compare the amount of time spent on media (television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet) with face-to-face socializing for youth from five countries on the WIP 2007. Watching television, face-to-face interactions, and time online were the three most frequent activities. Notably, youth in all of the countries reported spending more time face-to-face with their peers than on the Internet.

Fig. 1.1
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Media use and face-to-face socializing with friends among adolescents in the 2007 WIP (12- to 18-year olds)

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Figure 1.2 shows the frequency of various online activities that youth (12- to 18-year olds) in the USA and Canada reported engaging in on the WIP 2007, it does not include information about the use of the currently popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, as they were not included in the World Internet Project.Footnote 2 The activities are sorted according to daily use, and those at the top of the graph are the most frequent and those at the bottom are less so.

Fig. 1.2
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Overview of online activities (WIP 2007 – Canada and USA) among 12- to 18-year olds

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From Fig. 1.2, we see that American and Canadian youth use communication applications, such as instant messaging and e-mail most frequently followed by entertainment activities, such as downloading and listening to online music and playing online games. Ironically, parents reported that they bought these tools to help their children with school, but school-related uses were infrequent relative to the communication and entertainment activities. Adolescents in the other WIP countries used different online applications similarly. Communication tools are the most frequent, attesting that young people in a range of countries use the Internet primarily for communication; nonetheless, as we shall see, there are group differences (e.g., based on gender, ethnic group, and country of residence) in the use of particular online applications.

Social Networking Sites (SNSs)

As of Summer 2009, social networking sites or SNSs were the newest and more extensively used communication tool among youth (Reich, Subrahmanyam & Espinoza, 2009; Subrahmanyam, Reich, Waechter, & Espinoza, 2008). They allow users to create public or private profiles and form networks of “friends” with whom they can interact publicly (e.g., status updates or wall posts) and privately (e.g., private messages). SNS users can also post user-generated content (e.g., written notes, photos, and videos), which often elicit comments and result in further interaction.

Facebook and to a much lesser extent MySpace are the most widely used SNSs, but there are interfaces that are popular in other parts of world, such as Friendster, hi5, Orkut and Tagget.com (Wikipedia, 2009). As of September 2009, Facebook reported having more than 300 million users (Oreskovic, 2009). On large sample surveys of US youth, 55% (Lenhart & Madden, 2007) to 65% (Jones & Fox, 2009) reported that they used SNSs, and girls, particularly older ones, dominate the sites (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). In research studies with much smaller samples, 88% of high school students and 82% of college students used SNSs (Subrahmanyam et al., 2008). Within the USA, there are inter-group differences in the use of particular SNSs – more White youth report using Facebook compared to Latino youth, who tend to cluster on MySpace (Hargittai, 2007; Subrahmanyam et al., 2008), indicating that youth tend to gravitate to online venues that are also accessed by the other people in their lives. Evidence to date indicates that young people use SNSs to connect and reconnect with friends and family members (Subrahmanyam et al., 2008) (see Chapter 4).

Text Messaging

Text messaging or texting consists of short text messages up to 160 characters in length, usually exchanged between two cell/mobile phones or between the web and a mobile phone. In a recent survey conducted for The Wireless Trade Association, 14- to 19-year-old US youth reported that they spent equal amounts of time texting and talking; many (54% of the females and 40% of the males) claimed that their social life “would end or be worsened” without texting (Harris Interactive, 2008). Texting is mostly used to exchange messages with peers and centers around chatting (discussing activities and events, gossip, and homework help), planning (coordinating meeting arrangements), and coordinating communication (Grinter & Eldridge, 2001).

Blogs and Microblogs

Webblogs or blogs are personal web pages, which can be easily updated and where the entries are organized in reverse chronological order, such that newer entries are displayed before older entries (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2004). There are three basic kinds of blogs: filter blogs (content external to the bloggers such as links to world events), personal journals (content internal to the blog author such as his/her “thoughts and internal workings”) and k(nowledge)-logs, which contain information and observations, generally with a technological focus (Herring et al., 2004). Although blogging was initially quite the rage among youth, the 2007 WIP data shown in Fig. 1.3 reveals that blogging, especially blog writing, is not that frequent in this age group. At the time when research was conducted, blogs were popular, we know that English language bloggers who presented themselves as teensFootnote 3 were also overwhelming female (87%) (Subrahmanyam, Garcia, Harsono, Li, & Lipana, 2009). Compared to adult blogs, which tend to have content external to the blogger (filter-type blogs and k-logs), youth blogs are typically personal journal-type blogs, are narrative and reflective in style, and contain themes related to adolescents’ peers and everyday lives implying that adolescent bloggers project offline narratives and themes onto their online blogs.

Fig. 1.3
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Frequency of reading and writing blogs among 12- to 18-year olds (WIP 2007)

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Microblogging is the latest entrant in this genre and essentially consists of very brief updates of text and multimedia (audio and video) sent via text messaging or the Internet. Twitter, the leading microblogging platform, allows users to update via “tweets,” which are brief (140 characters) text-based updates sent via the Internet or text messaging to either a public or a private network of subscribers. At the time when we wrote this book in 2009, teens did not use twitter very much (TechCrunch, 2009), but we included it here since it is very much in the public eye and is very similar to the status updates on SNSs such as Facebook.

Online Phoning Applications

Adolescents also use the Internet to make phone calls or to audio chat using programs such as Skype and tools within Instant Messengers. From Fig. 1.4 we see that depending on their country of residence, between 5 and 29% of adolescents make online phone calls on a weekly basis. However, comparing Figs. 1.2 and 1.5, we see that adolescents use text-based chat such as instant messaging more often than audio chat. Many newer laptops have built-in web cams, and it is an open question whether use of voice and video chat will overtake older text-based communication formats.

Fig. 1.4
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Frequency of online phone calls among 12- to 18-year olds (WIP 2007)

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Fig. 1.5
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Frequency of instant messaging among 12- to 18-year olds (WIP 2007)

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Instant Messaging (IM)

Instant messaging is the synchronous exchange of a private message with another user; one can engage in multiple activities such as private messages simultaneously, switching back and forth between different conversation windows. Initially, messages used only text, but nowadays they allow attachments, voice or video calls, and even simple online games. Messenger services that are used the most by youth include AOL’s Messenger or AIM, Microsoft Instant Messenger, Gchat (part of gmail), and BlackBerry Messenger. Figure 1.5 shows the frequency of instant message use among adolescents in the seven WIP countries. At least in the USA, teens use instant messaging to connect with offline friends to talk about “ordinary yet intimate topics” such as friends and gossip (Gross, 2004).

Online Gaming

According to the 2009 Pew Report, online gaming was the most frequent online activity among US teens with 78% reporting that they played them (Jones & Fox, 2009). Compared to stand-alone games played on a game system or computer, where one actually plays against the computer, online gamers play against several other online players, known or unknown to them. There are many different genres of online games including action games (e.g., Counter-Strike), strategy games (e.g., Civilization series), sports and simulators (i.e., NBA, NHL, soccer, F1, flight simulators etc.), role playing games (RPGs) (e.g., Perfect World, Maple Story), and logic or other games (i.e., chess, Tetris etc.).Footnote 4 A special category of RPGs are the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and Everquest; set in online fantasy worlds, players assume game avatars or personas to explore the game world, interact and maybe fight with other players, and engage in other game-specific activities and quests. MMORPGs have been the subject of the most research, likely because of their potential for addiction, a topic we address in Chapter 9. Gaming research suggests that offline (Durkin & Barber, 2002) and online game playing (Griffiths, Davies, & Chappell, 2004) are the province of adolescent males compared to females. Figure 1.6 shows the frequency of online gaming among youth in the seven WIP countries.

Fig. 1.6
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Frequency of playing online games among 12- to 18-year olds (WIP 2007)

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Chat Rooms

Chat rooms are online spaces where users interact with each other in real time; they can be either public or private. Typically, multiple-users participate in several simultaneous conversations occurring at the same time in the chat space (Greenfield & Subrahmanyam, 2003); users can also engage in “whispering”, in which pairs of chat users engage in private IM conversations with each other. Early chat rooms were text-based, but subsequently, they incorporated audio and video chat. Participants in public chat rooms were often strangers to each other, unlike social networking sites, where most users interact with people they already know. Chat rooms were immensely popular when they first became available; however, safety concerns stemming from the potential to interact with strangers, especially adult predators, and the subsequent emergence of instant messaging and social networking sites led to their decline, at least among youth in some countries (see Fig. 1.7). Within chat rooms, participants adopt user names or nick names, which serve to identify their utterances in the public space. Often young users’ nicknames contain information about the self, such as gender, interests, sexual personas (Subrahmanyam, Greenfield, & Tynes, 2004) and seem to be used for identity presentation (Subrahmanyam, Šmahel, & Greenfield, 2006) and partner selection (Šmahel & Subrahmanyam, 2007), which are important developmental issues and are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.

Fig. 1.7
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Frequency of visiting chat rooms among 12- to 18-year olds (WIP 2007)

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Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are three-dimensional spaces, where users assume avatars and engage in a variety of activities, depending on the particular environment in which they are immersed. Relatively new in the lives of young people, it is estimated that 20 million or 53% of online youth between 3 and 17 years will visit virtual worlds by 2011 (eMarketer, 2007). At the time of writing, virtual worlds were much more popular among younger children than older youth (Subrahmanyam, 2009). Examples of worlds designed for younger children are Webkinz and Club Penguin, whereas those for adolescents include Second Life Teen Grid and Whyville. The virtual world that has received the most press is Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world for adult users 18 and older. A “Teen Grid” is separate form the main grid and is only open to teens between 13- and 17 years of age. Second Life residents can explore the world, meet other people and socialize with other residents by taking part in varied activities, such as concerts, classes, theaters, as well as creating and trading virtual property and services with each other. Whyville, a very different kind of virtual world for 8- to 16-year olds, allows users to engage in science and social activities (Fields & Kafai, 2007).

Bulletin Boards

Bulletin boards are public spaces, where users post messages asynchronously and there may or may not be a time lag between messages. However, unlike instant messaging or chat rooms, messages are not exchanged in real time, and are available for viewing long after they have been posted. In addition to actively exchanging information on bulletin boards, users can also passively “lurk,” where they read but do not post any messages. Bulletin boards tend to be organized around a focal topic, such as college admissions, computer use, health, politics, and religion and interactions involve both the exchange of information, advice, as well as emotional support and encouragement. We do not know the extent to which adolescents’ use bulletin boards, but research and anecdotal observations suggest that they do view and post on those focused on topics and issues central to their lives. For instance, we know that they use bulletin boards to find out information about general health and sexuality as well as about quintessentially adolescent problem behaviors such as cutting and anorexia – topics that we address in Chapters 8. As a parent of two teens, Subrahmanyam has observed young people participating in several US-based boards focused on college admissions, a very central issue in the lives of older adolescents. Bulletin boards based on sports are another example, and again she has observed her teen son, a sports-fanatic, spending hours on them.

Downloading Music and Videos

Downloading and listening to music and watching videos online are popular adolescent pastimes. The WIP data indicate that among 12- to 18-year-olds, it is the second most frequent online activity after the communication-based activities (see Fig. 1.2). From Figs. 1.8 and 1.9, we see that among youth in seven WIP countries, 80% or more download and listen to music on the Internet and 60% or more download and watch videos. Music, movies, and television are an integral part of youth sub-culture and college students report that downloading is an entertaining and convenient way to acquire music (Kinnally, Lacayo, McClung, & Sapolsky, 2008). Today, with more sophisticated computers and broadband technology, downloading is not limited to music and videos, and includes any kind of content, including movies, television shows, games, and podcasts; moreover, small and portable devices such as iPods ensure that this content can be accessed virtually anywhere and we expect these activities to become even more pervasive in the near future. There is of course the thorny issue of illegal downloading, a topic that we cover in Chapter 6.

Fig. 1.8
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Frequency of downloading/listening to music among 12- to 18-year olds (WIP 2007)

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Fig. 1.9
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Frequency of downloading/watching videos among 12- to 18-year olds (WIP 2007)

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Characteristics of Digital Communication Environments

Communication features prominently in young people’s use of digital media such as computers and mobile phones. Yet by their very nature, these technologies provide a communication environment that is very different from that of face-to-face settings. Some important characteristics of digital communication contexts that we consider next include, disembodied users, text-based communication, disinhibited behavior, self-disclosure, use of emoticons, and multitasking as well as media-multitasking; keep in mind that each characteristic is present to different degrees in different communication forms, and even within a particular form, as it changes and evolves.

Disembodied Users

An important characteristic of most digital communication that occurs via a screen is that users are disembodied – in other words, information about their face and body is not always available as in face-to-face communication. This was particularly true for the early communication applications such as chat rooms, bulletin boards, and instant messaging. However, with web cams and the easy uploading of digital images, this is less true as users can upload digital representations of the self to convey basic identifying information such as their age and sex. Still there are differences relative to face-to-face settings. First, users can upload any representation that may or may not resemble their true selves. Second, even when such representations are available, other important real-time communication cues such as gaze, gestures, and body language remain missing. Such missing information presents both opportunities as well as challenges, and throughout the book, we will show how users, particularly young ones, have adapted to take advantage of the opportunities and circumvent the challenges that they present.

Anonymity

Because users are fundamentally disembodied when communicating via digital media, they also have the potential to be as anonymous as they wish to be. Indeed, the Internet was originally touted as a place where one could leave one’s body behind (Kendall, 2003; Stallabrass, 1995; Wakeford, 1999). To some extent, this was true during the early days of the Internet. Because of the nature of technology (lower bandwidths, no images or video), the nature of the applications that were available (e.g., chat rooms, bulletin boards), and the fact that the Internet was not very diffuse, one was not as likely to meet and interact with friends and acquaintances while online. Anonymity on the Internet is much more complex today – users can choose to be anonymous on applications, such as bulletin boards and virtual worlds such as Second Life. However, anonymity may be virtually impossible on applications like social networking sites, where cues about the body and the self are readily available, and where teens may be more likely to interact with people whom they already know offline. Nevertheless, even when one is supposedly not anonymous, users can nonetheless fabricate their online identity or embellish parts of an otherwise true offline identity. Finally, online anonymity is hard to achieve, as every device on an online network has a Public IP address, and one needs to be technologically sophisticated to hide or mask an IP address.

Text-Based Communication

Most forms of digital communication are visual and text-based; they use alphanumeric characters, icons, pictures, and other visual representations and contain features of both written and oral language. Consider the conversations that occur in a chat room. Greenfield and Subrahmanyam (2003) have proposed that chat “takes place in the written medium (typing words on a keyboard and reading words on a screen), but like spoken language, particularly unplanned speech, it generally consists of shorter, incomplete, grammatically simple and often incorrect (grammar and typographical errors) sentences.” Figure 1.10 shows an extract of an online teen chat room that illustrates these features.

Fig. 1.10
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Extract of a transcript from an online teen chat room analyzed by Greenfield and Subrahmanyam (2003)

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This remains true of much of the interactions on other electronic communication applications such as e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, and social networking sites, and we are seeing the emergence of a new electronic register (Greenfield & Subrahmanyam, 2003), variously called netspeak or textspeak (Crystal, 2004, 2006). A big part of Netspeak is the slang words and acronyms that users have created, teens are adept at using, and parents may have difficulty comprehending. Examples include, POS (parent over shoulder), BRB (be right back), GTG (got to go), IDK (I don’t know), NIFOC (naked in front of computer), P911 (parent emergency), TDTM (talk dirty to me) (Ray, 2009). There are several online resources for those who wish to decode this register; for instance, the site http://www.noslang.com has both a slang dictionary and a slang translator.

Self-Disclosure and Disinhibition

There is considerable anecdotal and also experimental evidence that people behave in a disinhibited fashion and/or have high levels of self-disclosure on the Internet (Joinson, 2007). The decisive factor is probably the degree of anonymity one can experience on the Internet, as high anonymity often means greater self-disclosure, and vice versa. Research confirms that self-disclosure is higher in interactions occurring via text communication on the Internet than in the physical realm (Joinson, 2001); among undergraduate college students, spontaneous self-disclosure was higher in visually anonymous virtual discussions compared to face-to-face discussions. Within the context of computer-mediated communication, visually anonymous participants disclosed more than non-visually anonymous participants.

Regardless, youth may behave differently in different online environments, as some virtual contexts may be highly interconnected to their offline selves, whereas others may be less connected, and entail more experimenting with identity. Consequently, the level of self-disclosure and disinhibited behavior may vary in anonymous chat rooms as opposed to less anonymous social networking sites. Thus, when considering findings about self-disclosure, we should take into account the research method and the particular online context that was studied.

We will see in Chapters 2 and 5 that an important adolescent need is to develop intimate relationships that are based on openness, honesty, and self-disclosure (Brown, 2004). Research has found that during early and middle adolescence, there is an increase in self-disclosure to friends; this trend starts in early adolescence for girls and in middle adolescence for boys (Buhrmester & Prager, 1995). It is therefore not surprising that youth take advantage of the opportunities for self-disclosure that are available in digital contexts. In our own research, we have found that self-disclosure occurs in young people’s online forays. For instance, teen bloggers self-disclosed often about their peers, families, partners as well as daily life (Subrahmanyam et al., 2009) and they report that they are mostly truthful when writing about their offline lives in their blogs (Blinka & Šmahel, 2009).

Use of Emoticons

On the face of it, text-based, disembodied online contexts, with their lack of facial cues and body language, should make it difficult to express and share emotions. Despite this, adolescents are very adept at conveying their emotions in their digital communication. In our analysis of English-language blogs written by teens, we found that 29% of entries contained explicit and strong emotions, such as anger, frustration, happiness, sadness and love. One important way that youth are able to do this is via their extensive use of emotional icons or “emoticons.” Emoticons typically consist of characters that indicate a writer’s mood or facial expression, e.g., :-), :-(, ;-), :-o, :-D, :D, :- P, =O, :-O; these commonly used emoticons convey a variety of emotions or states, from cheery and smiling to shock and surprise. Many online applications, such as instant messengers, chat room providers, and social networking sites also provide users with pre-formed graphic emoticons that they can easily insert into text-based communication. To adults, the meaning of the seemingly endless (and fast evolving) list of emoticons is not obvious, and many of us have probably had to look up online lists to glean their meaning. Therefore, it is fascinating to contemplate how young digital natives generate and transmit them with such apparent ease.

Given the widespread use of emoticons in electronic communication, an important question is whether they help Internet users to understand emotions in online communication (Šmahel, 2001, 2003b). Emoticons, particularly character-based ones, are much more ambiguous relative to face-to-face cues and may end up being interpreted very differently by different users. Nonetheless, research indicates that they are useful tools in online text-based communication (Derks, Bos, & von Grumbkow, 2008; Huang, Yen, & Zhang, 2008; Lo, 2008). One study of 137 IM users revealed that (Lo, 2008) emoticons allowed users to correctly understand the level and direction of emotion, attitude, and attention expression and that emoticons were a definite advantage in non-verbal communication. Similarly, another study showed that emoticons were useful in strengthening the intensity of a verbal message, as well as in the expression of sarcasm; it confirmed that they have an impact on message interpretation (Derks et al., 2008) and can thus similar serve functions as nonverbal behavior.

Media-Multitasking and Multitasking

Media multitasking is the practice of using different media (e.g., television and the Internet) at the same time. Electronic multitasking is the phenomenon of simultaneously using multiple computer applications (e.g., Internet and word processing applications), multiple windows of the same application (e.g., multiple instant message windows) (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2008a), or even multiple attention targets in the same application window (as in an action video game with multiple, often simultaneous things occurring at different locations on the screen). Much of young people’s technology use occurs in a multitasking context (Gross, 2004; Roberts et al., 2005); see Fig. 1.11 for a computer screen shot showing the multiple open windows on a teen’s computer. In her 2006 article on the multitasking generation, Claudia Wallis described Piers, a 14-year old, in his bedroom in front of his computer at 9:30 p.m. as being “logged onto to a MySpace chat room and AOL messenger for the past 3 h.” Also open were a Google Images window, several instant messaging windows, and iTunes, through which he was listening to a mix of music. All the while he was working on a Word file – an English class – and he reported that he gets “it done a little bit at time” (Wallis, 2006).

Fig. 1.11
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Computer screen shot showing the multiple open windows on a teen’s computer screen

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Such media multitasking is becoming the norm among young people. In the 2005 Kaiser Report, Roberts and colleagues found that 8- to 18-year olds in the USA consumed about 8.5 h of media content in approximately 6.5 h time, which incidentally held steady from the previous report. Multitasking is certainly not limited to young people. In a study of 1,319 Americans from different generations, combining of different tasks occurred frequently among all generations, especially while listening to music or eating (Carrier, Cheever, Rosen, Benitez, & Chang, 2009). However, members of the youngest generation (the Net-Generation, which the authors refer to as individuals born after the year 1978) reported more multitasking than other generations.

We know very little about why young people are so enamored of multitasking. Consider what one young girl told us about multitasking while instant messaging: Good net users manage about five people. They have one in one window, the second in the second window, and so on. So it’s a bit different, like if you were sitting in three pubs at the same time. In three different pubs (Šmahel, 2003a).

Another 15-year old girl told us: It’s intoxicating- you simply feel great…you’re the centre of attention…that’s the state when everyone is writing till you can’t keep up. Perhaps they simply like to communicate with more people simultaneously because it makes them feel important, or it enables them to obtain support from more members of their peer group, or may be even diverts them from the stresses of their own life. Alternatively, perhaps the feeling of not being able to keep up with their communication partners is intoxicating in itself; in the words of another girl: I had the feeling that I couldn’t keep up because I had so many friends that I can’t even manage to talk with all of them. These statements suggest adolescents may associate simultaneous electronic communication with multiple peers with positive feelings, feelings that may be comparable to the adrenaline rush that accompanies success in sports.

Despite its popularity, multitasking may come with some costs. In the study by Carrier et al. (2009) described earlier, participants reported that they experienced difficulties while multitasking, although those in the younger generation reported lower difficulty ratings compared to older generations. There was agreement across generations as to which tasks could be combined together (such as listening to music while eating or surfing the web while telephoning) leading the researchers to conclude that participants of all generations might share similar limitations on the ability to multitask. There are likely some social costs entailed because of multitasking as well. In our work with youth, we have heard of incidents where a youth accidentally sent a text intended for a romantic partner to a casual friend (certainly embarrassing!) or upset a peer because he/she was inattentive when interacting with them. We also suspect that multitasking very likely impacts parent–child interactions and family relationships, an issue that merits further study.

Studying Young People’s Digital Worlds

We have shown thus far that the youth digital landscape is as varied as it is complex, and studying their role in development is not an easy task. Here we consider issues that arise while doing research on young people’s digital worlds; when considering the role of technology in development, we must be cognizant of the logistical and methodological considerations that have hampered research on this topic.

Logistical Considerations

For researchers, one of the biggest challenges has been keeping up with the technology that teens actually use and there are several reasons for this. First, over the last decade, interactive technologies have been changing at a very rapid pace. Second, among young people, the popularity of electronic gadgets (e.g., Razr phone, i-Phone) and online applications (e.g., chat rooms and blogs) resemble fashion fads – hot and insanely popular for a while, then tapering off. Some online applications (e.g., instant messaging or social networking sites) and gadgets (mobile devices that can be used to phone, instant message, etc.) seem to have longer lasting power and may be here to stay. Third, not only do applications change, but also as we noted earlier, norms and behaviors within them are constantly in flux. Fourth, compared to adults young people are more likely to be early adopters of technology, and to become very proficient (in terms of speed and skill) at using them. Because of all of these reasons, adult researchers, generally considered digital immigrants, have the unenviable task of trying to play catch-up when it comes to studying the online behavior of young digital natives.

This has happened to us repeatedly when we first began to study young people’s use of the Internet. By the time we recognized the popularity of chat rooms among youth, procured funding, designed our study, received approval from Institutional Review Boards, and conducted our study chat rooms had peaked. Even as we analyzed our data, wrote up our results, and published it, young people had moved on to instant messaging and blogs. Researchers who are interested in studying online behavior must change how they conduct their research – they have to be flexible and readily adapt their methods as the technology changes. By all indications, they are recognizing this, and we have already seen several articles and compilations about social networking site use among college students.

Another challenge is that as digital immigrants, adult researchers in effect adopt an outsider’s perspective when studying adolescents’ online worlds and virtual behavior; in other words, they use what the linguist Kenneth Pike called an etic approach. Such an approach might hinder their ability to study and understand young people’s online behavior. Consider our experience when we first began to study online teen chat rooms. We could not make sense of a printed transcript of a chat conversation. Repeated examination of the transcripts gradually began to reveal some meaningful utterances, but we were still at a loss until a lab meeting, when a graduate student in her early twenties, mapped out the different conversation threads for us. We also spent a lot of time in adult chat rooms, as observers and then participants, sometimes asking other users to explain codes and conventions. All of these efforts culminated in our work on conversational coherence (Greenfield & Subrahmanyam, 2003) and on the construction of developmental processes (Šmahel & Subrahmanyam, 2007; Subrahmanyam et al., 2004, 2006) in online teen chat contexts.

Ideally, we should try to use such an emic approach, one where the researcher is a participant observer within the online culture under study. This was much easier when online contexts were public and we were able to gain access within them to observe and record online interactions. This is of course much harder to do nowadays as applications are either private (e.g., instant messaging) or have privacy controls that youth can use to limit access to those they choose (e.g., social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook). Although this seems to be a challenge, creative solutions can be found, such as having teenage informants and research assistants; researchers at the Children’s Digital Media Center @ Los Angeles have also used focus groups of MySpace users and have had MySpace users conduct video tours of their sites (Manago, Graham, Greenfield, & Salimkhan, 2008).

Methodological Considerations

A fundamental methodological issue is the problem of the non-existent control group; experimental and control groups are the time-honored tradition by which psychologists arrive at causal inferences when studying the effect of one variable on the other. However, because of the rapid diffusion of technology, at any given time, only small numbers of youth do not use the more popular online applications. Finding an equivalent control group of teens, who do not use the Internet or a particular application or use it less frequently, is well neigh impossible today, even in less-industrialized countries. Even if one did find such a group, the technology using and non-using groups would not be truly comparable, limiting what one could conclude about the Internet’s effects. Longitudinal data are a way around this problem and two examples of this approach include Steinfield, Ellison, and Lampe’s (2008) study of the relation between self-esteem, Facebook use, and social capital among college students and Eijnden and colleagues’ s study of the relation between online communication, compulsive Internet use, and well-being among adolescents (Eijnden, Meerkerk, Vermulst, Spijkerman, & Engels, 2008).

Another methodological problem is that of operationalizing and measuring online behavior. Online time use is one of the more vexing of Internet variables to study. To highlight this problem we ask the reader to estimate the average amount of time he/she spends online every day, including a breakdown of the three most frequent online activities. Pretty soon it becomes obvious that this is a very difficult task to do – not only because the Internet has become such a big part of our every day lives, from e-mail, to health information, to movie ticket bookings, to directions, to recipes, and so on, but also because so much of this use occurs when we are multitasking. We consider the issue of time in further detail in Chapter 7, where we discuss the effect of Internet use on well-being. Other aspects of technology, such as the particular applications used, the activities within them, the people interacted with, are equally hard to measure. One option is to use software that automatically records online activities, but their use raises privacy and ethical concerns, and the interesting problem of data overload. Self-reports tend to be the most frequently used method of measuring Internet use and the reader is advised to keep in mind their limitations (e.g., memory loss, biased estimates) when we consider research that utilized such measures.

Ascertaining details about participants’ identity such as their age, sex, race, and location is another important methodological challenge when studying online behavior. Greenfield and Yan (2006) point out that in developmental research, age, gender, and race are reported as a matter of course. In fact, they are important pieces of information that must be known when attempting to identify developmental trends and differences (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2008b). Yet these basic pieces of information about participants are not always available in anonymous online contexts, such as chat rooms and bulletin boards; similarly, in anonymous online surveys, we do not even know if participants or respondents are correctly reporting their age, gender, and other demographic details. Even when available, such as in blog profiles, self-reported age, gender, or location information might not be accurate; in our blog study a few participants even reported that they were from “Antarctica” (Subrahmanyam et al., 2009). The challenge for researchers is to obtain both accurate age and sex information as well as ecologically valid online assessments (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2008b). Some ways of accomplishing this is by recruiting subjects offline and then sending them links to online surveys (Subrahmanyam et al., 2009), or recruiting participants via e-mail in a bounded community, such as a university campus (Steinfield et al., 2008).

Goals and Organization of the Book

Our goal is to examine adolescents’ use of interactive technology as well as the developmental implications of such use. Chapter 2 presents our developmental approach with an overview of adolescence (adolescent developmental tasks, such as sexuality and intimacy and the role of the context in development) and the theoretical framework that we adopt in this book. In line with this developmental treatment, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will show how young people use digital technology in the service of core adolescent developmental issues of sexuality, identity, and intimacy. Chapter 6 does the same for the development of ethics, morality, and engagement to one’s communities, a less central but nonetheless important adolescent developmental issue.

The second part of the book examines some of the practical implications of young people’s technology use. In Chapters 7 and 8, we examine how technology use is related to well being – directly as an information resource and indirectly as a tool for providing interventions and treatment. Chapters 9 and 10 address the darker and more unsavory aspects of technology in young people’s lives – online addictive behavior (Chapter 9) and violent and hateful content and aggressive interactions including cyber bullying by peers and sexual solicitation and victimization by predatory strangers/adults (Chapter 10). In Chapter 11, we will see what different stakeholders (e.g., parents, government) can do to protect youth from harmful online content and victimization. In Chapter 12, we present a summary and a synthesis of what it means to be an adolescent living life online in digital contexts, identify some common and enduring themes that we encountered throughout, and look ahead to the future.

Although our goal is to present a comprehensive developmental account of young people’s interactions with new technologies, we do not review all the studies on this topic. Instead, we identify and highlight topics and research studies that, in our opinion, can help us to come to a better understanding of the developmental implications of adolescents’ digital lives. Even though we set out to examine the different kinds of digital technologies used by youth, extant research has largely focused on the Internet and online applications accessed via computers, and so our discussion reflects this state of the field as well. However, for ease of writing, we occasionally use the terms digital media, technology, online contexts, and digital contexts interchangeably and synonymously with the term “Internet” and “Internet contexts.” Similarly, at times we use the words “teens,” and “youth” in place of “adolescents.” Finally, we avoid the phrase “real world” to refer to offline, physical worlds, since we cannot discount the possibility that for youth, virtual worlds may be more real than even so-called real worlds.

We highlight different online applications and electronic contexts in different chapters – for instance, texting, instant messaging and social networking sites are discussed in Chapter 4, gaming in Chapters 9 and 10, web surfing in Chapter 8 and online music content in Chapter 10. As we wrote our book, we were very mindful that digital media operate like a fad, and an online application that is very much the rage at the time when we wrote this chapter, might very well be fading in popularity by the time the book was published. Therefore, we included a study on an application if the results were relevant to development, regardless of whether teens were still using it. It is our hope that a developmental approach will give the reader a timeless account of digital media in young people’s lives, one that will still be relevant even when newer and more sophisticated applications have replaced the currently available ones.