When the Internet first became popular it was because of the ability to easily access information. The Internet’s importance has morphed into a necessary tool for connecting people (8). Online social networks have changed the way people interact with each other and maintain social relationships and have redefined the social order by removing the middle man and allowing all people to create media content and have it spread throughout the population. The impact is seen more clearly in adolescents and young adults as they are still learning social skills. Today’s young generation has grown up with technology and are the ones inventing and adapting it to suit their needs whereas the older ones are simply learning to adapt to the technology. Social networking has reached almost all communities globally. The older generation find it to be a useful tool, whereas the younger generation cannot seem to imagine life without it (2).
Online, you can now contact old friends that faded from your life and find potential suitors on dating sites with such highly specific criteria that it seems more like shopping for a new product than for a date. Some example sites where the names speak for themselves are christianmingle.com, sugardaddie.com, gaymusclematch.com, and seniorpeoplemeet.com (1). There is even the online Chinese game, wang hun, in which users can role-play marriages with each other. These online relationships have been so real that they have been used as grounds for divorce in actual married couples (2). However on a positive note, this young generation report feeling closer to their family than their parents did (2). Families stay connected more easily when teenagers go to college or move to different cities or countries through Skype, Facebook and text messages, taking the burden out of maintaining these relationships.
Social networking not only brings friends and families together, but has created “Digital Tribalism” (2), enabling people with similar interests to band together and communicate directly in a mass communication style without information being diluted or censored by the media. A recent example of this being effective was the Egyptian Arab Spring, when one man’s call for action against the government sparked a mass protest of over one million people just 14 days later because his message was spread through social media platforms, mainly Facebook and Twitter (3). Interactive social media sites like Facebook give users an alternative method of one-to-many communication, similar to radio and television, but with the difference of allowing anyone to become the producer of content and not just be a consumer (5).
In a study by Pempek, Yermolaveva & Calvert (2009), the majority of college students spent more time looking at other people’s posts, photos and profiles than producing content. The desire to consume content has not changed over the generations, but the means by which it is consumed has. Unlike newspapers, radio, and television, the Internet allows consumers to be interactive with the possibility of posting their own material, though they are still bigger consumers than producers. With all this extra production, however, the quality of content is diminished (5) as social networking provides youth an endless stream of example behaviour from their peers.
A majority of these examples are coming from sites like Facebook, which is used mainly as a way of communicating with peers, not with members of other generations (5). With the breaking down of traditional networks such as religious circles, youth are still seeking role models. Religious following is on a downwards scale from 65% of those aged over 65 identifying as religious, but only 44% of young adults aged 18 to 29 (6). Today’s youth see old people as being out of touch and their views are assumed to be irrelevant, outdated and old-fashioned (6). As adolescents develop, their behaviour is influenced by their peers. Children learn not to behave like adults, who are always telling them to do as they say and not as they do. Children do not learn to do things that are “just for grown-ups” like smoking and swearing, they learn it from older children because the younger ones want to fit in socially (4). Young people today get exposed to so much more information than youth did before the Internet. This exposure gives the impression that if someone else is doing it, then it is OK if they do it too (4).
There has always been the need for adolescents to establish an identity for themselves. One means to achieve this is through self-disclosure to peers (5). Adolescent development is characterised by identity formation and the establishment of one’s sense of self, and how they fit in among their peers, in particular, sexually and morally. This is a period of exploration and change (5). Through self exposure the young person can clarify facets of their personality through the positive and negative responses from their peers. Facebook is seen as having a positive effect on the development of identity and intimacy in young adults as it gives them a platform from which to explore the social acceptability of their behaviour through the feedback of their peers (Buhrmester & Prager, 1995 cited in 5).
Specific to today’s young generation is the desire for celebrity through this self-disclosure. Consider the explosion in popularity of reality television. People get the chance to become instant celebrities without doing anything spectacular. A study has found a positive correlation between time spent watching reality television and time spent on social media sites, and with likeliness to befriend people they have little to no connection with offline (7). Social networking makes it easy to create and maintain a large group of superficial relationships giving them the opportunity to create any persona they like as these people do not know anything about their real life. The opportunity to maintain such loose relationships did not exist before the Internet (7).
In Pempek, Yermolaveva & Calvert’s (2009) study students were twice as likely to post messages openly on a friend’s wall as sending them a private message. In other words, they want to be seen as being socially successful. It would defeat the purpose of popularity perception to send a private message, as then nobody would be able to see that you are close enough to the cheer leading captain to say “The guy’s face at the store yesterday... priceless!!! LOL”. Students spent an average of 30 minutes a day on Facebook, showing how prevalent the site has become in their daily lives. Integration into society is demonstrated by the increase in time spent on Facebook since 2007 where it was 10 to 30 minutes per day (Ellison et al, 2007 cited in 5).
Online social networks are used by some to compensate for social limitations of shyness. A study has shown that college students spend more time online maintaining existing friendships with friends from their hometown instead of going out and making new friends (5). Social networking is seen by some researchers as a means to reinforce strong relationships but this is at the expense of forming new relationships (2). People must now choose where to invest their time socially, whereas before the Internet they had no choice but to be social with people who were in the same location.
All the evidence is pointing in the same direction; social networking online is a natural progression of human nature. It has created an irresistible platform for people to connect with each other, particularly to the younger generation who crave the attention and feedback of their peers. People who are in a minority group can easily find others just like them online, giving them social reinforcement, addressing issues of loneliness, isolation and depression. There is, however, so much content online that is being shared and spread so rapidly that it can give mixed messages to young people, with them sometimes landing on the wrong answers. With the younger generation moulding the technology to meet social needs, only time will tell how much further it can go.
REFERENCES
2- Brown, A 2011, ‘Relationships, community, and identity in the new virtual society’, Futurist, 45, 2, pp. 29-34, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 December 2011
4- Harris, JR 1998, The nurture assumption: why children turn out the way they do, 2nd edn, Simon & Schuster, New York.
5- Pempek, T, Yermolaveva, Y, & Calvert, S 2009, ‘College students’ social networking experiences on Facebook’, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30, 3, pp. 227-238, ERIC, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 December 2011
6- Salman, J 2009, ‘Old, young don’t see eye to eye in widening generation gap: Study finds wider differences in social values, lifestyle’. Florida Times-Union, (Jacksonville, FL), 30 June, Newspaper Source, EBSCOhost, viewed 3 December 2011
7- Watson, ST 2008, “College students’ online behaviour mimics people on TV ‘reality’ shows.” Buffalo News, The (NY), 27 May, Newspaper Source, EBSCOhost, viewed 6 December 2011
8- Weaver, A, & Morrison, B 2008, ‘Social networking’, Computer, 41, 2, pp. 97-1000, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 December 2011
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