Matching reality and virtuality: Are adolescents lying on their weblogs? (original) (raw)

Fourteen Is Fourteen and a Girl Is a Girl: Validating the Identity of Adolescent Bloggers

2009

This study focuses on the phenomenon of lying on adolescents' weblogs. The sample consisted of 113 completed surveys out of 120 in total. The age of participants ranged between 13 and 17 years old. Interviews were conducted with 10 randomly selected participants whose answers were then verified. The results suggest not only that adolescents present personal information such as their age, gender, and place of residence but that these pieces of information are presented truthfully. Generally, the level of dishonesty was low, with young adolescents tending to lie more often about their interests. Public topics (school and life) had the most truthful answers, whereas the least truthful answers concerned intimate topics (family life, partnership). These results suggest that adolescents' blogs serve as a place where the writers can both present themselves and communicate with their peers in a way that goes beyond a traditional diary.

Adolescent Internet use: What we expect, what teens report • Pages 633-649 Elisheva F. Gross

As adolescent Internet use grew exponentially in the last decade, with it emerged a number of correspondent expectations. Among them were the following: (1) that gender predicts usage, i.e., that boys spend more time online, surfing the web and playing violent games, while girls chat or shop online; (2) that Internet use causes social isolation and depression, especially for teens; and (3) that adolescents use the Internet for anonymous identity experimentation. These expectations were based on research with earlier technologies when the Internet was less diffused in the adolescent population. By means of highly detailed daily reports of adolescents' home Internet usage and peer-related adjustment, the present research sought to compare these expectations with the actual experiences of early and mid-adolescents in 2000 and 2001. Participants were 261 7th and 10th graders from suburban California public schools who completed four consecutive end-of-day reports on their school-based adjustment and Internet activity (including detailed logs of instant messages). Results challenge prevailing expectations regarding gender, well-being, and identity play. For the most part, adolescent boys' and girls' online activities have become more similar than different. On average, boys and girls alike described their online social interaction as (1) occurring in private settings such as e-mail and instant messages, (2) with friends who are also part of their daily, offline lives, and (3) devoted to fairly ordinary yet intimate topics (e.g., friends, gossip). No associations were found between Internet usage and well-being. Online pretending was reported to be motivated by a desire to play a joke on friends more often than to explore a desired or future identity, but participants reported a range of pretending content, contexts, and motives. D

Teens on the InternetInterpersonal Connection, Identity, and Information

Computers, Phones, and the InternetDomesticating Information Technology, 2006

who pushed for the scientific integration of children and their real-world environments. The goal of the CDMCs is to both carry out and seed long-term research in the area of digital media, which is a huge and understudied component of children's and adolescents' lives. We also would like to thank our collaborators and research assistants on the individual projects: Jerel Calzo, Lindsey Reynolds, and Ellen Rogelberg. 2 Teens On the Internet: Interpersonal Connection, Identity, and Information When the New York Times Magazine looked to teenagers to herald the dawn of the twenty-first century, it found them online. In an article in the magazine's Millenium issue, journalist Camille Sweeney (1999) marveled at the nature, speed, and sheer abundance of communication among teenagers that she had observed in chat rooms and message boards throughout AOL and the Web. In the ensuing years, teenagers' use of the Internet (and in particular Instant Messaging) has grown to the point where today's youth are referred to as the Internet (Tapscott, 1998) and Instant Message generation (Pew, 2001). Though about 75% of young people in the US are estimated to have Internet access, there is very little research on aspects of their Internet use such as "its nature and quality, its social conditions, cultural practices, and personal meanings" (Livingstone, 2003, p. 159). The unique social and communicative environment of the Internet gives rise to intriguing research questions about its use among youth: how do teenagers typically spend their time online? How important is communication in this total picture, and by what means do adolescents communicate on the

Adolescents' identity experiments on the Internet

New Media & Society, 2005

The aim of this article is to investigate how often adolescents engage in internet-based identity experiments, with what motives they engage in such experiments and which self-presentational strategies they use while experimenting with their identity. Six hundred nine to 18-year-olds completed a questionnaire in their classroom. Of the adolescents who used the internet for chat or Instant Messaging, 50 percent indicated that they had engaged in internet-based identity experiments. The most important motive for such experiments was selfexploration (to investigate how others react), followed by social compensation (to overcome shyness) and social facilitation (to facilitate relationship formation). Age, gender and introversion were significant predictors of the frequency with which adolescents engaged in internetbased identity experiments, their motives for such experiments, and their self-presentational strategies.

Real Worlds, Virtual Worlds – Young People in Chat Rooms

We often hear and read sentences like: the way people interact is not as before; the multimedia society where we live is changing the nature of the human being; the use of the Internet in the daily life of the individual makes him isolated of the rest of the community; the technological evolution pushes the individual for the ghetto of the techno-cyberculture, without any values. We live imbued and enclosed by an interconnected world. The power of communication lies in the fact to make it in real time, of immediate and simultaneous form, independently of the geographical distance. The technological and social advances allow the birth of a social platform of communication, in which communication is possible in the most varied expressions. This is a exploratory research comparing two groups (16-17 years old), who interact frequently off and on-line (real and virtual world), from an anthropological point of view, using sociometric techniques. The purpose is to verify if their impressions of the other(s) and their behavior, as well, changes while interacting on-line.

Looking at identity construction processes in the cyberspace

Medimond, International Proceedings, 2010

This paper presents some results of the analysis we conducted on patterns of online self-presentations and interactions among a sample of late Italian adolescents. Our study was conceived as a preliminary investigation on some psychosocial processes underpinning online communication aspects of identity construction. Our sample comprised 31 Italian undergraduate psychology students (age range: 19-21) that were invited to join anonymously a virtual community including both a weblog and a forum. The exploratory text analysis we performed on weblog and forum contents showed the presence of recurrent themes referring to crucial areas such as academic engagement, professional dimensions of future, interpersonal relationships (romantic and family issues) and personal interests. Our contribution tried to adopt a new narrative perspective on the use of electronic communication devices both as instruments of self disclosure and ways to gain access to a relational network in which the real and the virtual merge into one another.