Impact of the Internet on Relationships and Community During Adolescence :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

From birth, humans try on connectedness. Regular social interaction is almost as important as eating or sleeping, and is achieved through social activities and relationships with family and friends. Creating and maintaining these relationships is a process that occurs passim an individuals lifetime. Yet, during adolescence these interpersonal relationships start to reach a oddly important function. Interactions with family and peers are vital to adolescent identicalness formation, and the crucial region of these relationships places additional stress on the bonds during this life coiffure. As Steinberg mentioned in a recent paper, Adolescence has long been characterized as a time when individuals begin to look and examine psychological characteristics of the self in order to discover who they very are, and how they fit in the social world in which they live(Steinberg, 2001). The predilection that adolescence is a time of role experimentation and a stage of individuality fo rmation (Erikson, 1956) has existed for decades, dating back to Eriksons definition of the life stage Identity vs. Role Confusion. In this stage, as the adolescent begins to be certain of how their personal identity is perceived by others, a heightened level of identity sensory faculty develops. Although Eriksons idea of a life stage with perfect delineated boundaries is now fairly obsolete, the struggle to define ones identity during adolescence is still very present and relevant. With the advent of the internet, the possibilities for defining the self have expanded dramatically. The youth sector latched onto this technology, using it to help ease and despatch connections with others. Email and Instant messenging allowed people to communicate quickly in a non-confrontational fashion, and weblog communities encouraged individuals to share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions with others online. All of these methods of communication allow the individual to scoop out multiple identities. According to (Lenhart, 2001) almost one quarter of teens admit to computer simulation to be someone else over Instant messenger or email. Thus, it is incontrovertible that this online medium is forum where the expression of role confusion and diffusion gutter occur freely. But, what impact does this have on the formation of a whiz identity that is congruent with the ego? An important part of the adolescent identity formation process is the recognition that others notice the outbound expression of the self, and that this outward expression must agree with others in order to fit into a social group.