According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 75% of all U.S. teens have a cell phone. When you drop the age to 12 years old, it’s still a whopping 58% with a ring-tone piping out of their pocket. 90% of all those kids are texting each other at any given moment—to a tally of around 50 times a day. And if they’re not texting, tweeting or e-mailing one another (although, hey man, e-mail is so last gen) then they’re probably chit-chatting with one of their hundreds (thousands?) of Facebook friends.
Now some have said that all this interconnective tech is a problem in one way or the other. (In fact, ahem, I may have said it myself at some point.) But I recently spotted an article on guardian.co.uk that said there’s research that points to this electronic umbilical connection as being a pretty positive thing.
The piece quoted a Professor Patti Valkenburg of the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Research on Children, Adolescents and the Media, who said that adolescents have a great desire for “self-presentation, or communicating [their] identity to others” as well as a need for “self-disclosure” and “discussing intimate topics,” all of which helps them “validate their opinions and determine the appropriateness of their attitudes and behaviors.”
Valkenberg went on to say that all this technological connectivity helps to “give their users a sense of increased controllability. That, in turn, allows them to feel secure about their communication, and thus freer in their interpersonal relations.”
That may sound a bit stuffy, but it makes good sense. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I used to thump that hollow log in Morse Code to stay in touch with kids in a nearby cave for those very same reasons.
Of course, in the same article I’m quoting from, the author reported a 16-year-old girl as saying that she’d “rather give up, like, a kidney than her phone.” And that doesn’t sound quite so sensible.
But Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist from that Pew study group I mentioned first, agrees with the Prof from Amsterdam.
“Simply, these technologies meet teens’ developmental needs,” says Lenhart. “Mobile phones and social networking sites make the things teens have always done—defining their own identity, establishing themselves as independent of their parents, looking cool, impressing members of the opposite sex—a whole lot easier.”
And she also said that, “Our research shows face-to-face time between teenagers hasn’t changed over the past five years. Technology has simply added another layer on top. Yes, you can find studies that suggest online networking can be bad for you. But there are just as many that show the opposite.”
So there you have it, a few positive opinions about the kids’ burning desire to stay connected to their pals via today’s high tech highways.
Talk, or thump, amongst yourselves.
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