3-023 - Adolescents and Digital Communication: Developmental Struggles and Challenges, Hopes and Dreams

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Integrative Statement

Youth with access to computers and mobile devices are living their social lives online. Adolescents in the United States send an average of 60 text messages per day (Lenhart, 2012) and prefer communicating with friends more via text messaging than any other mode of communication, including face-to-face interaction (Lenhart, Ling, & Campbell, 2010). Over 20 million minors globally use Facebook, 7.5 million of whom are under the age of 13 (Consumer Reports, 2010). College students claim to spend an average of over 100 minutes daily on Facebook (Junco, 2012). As adolescents begin to view Facebook as a province of adults, they are choosing new platforms for digital communication; adolescents are moving onto Twitter in large numbers – 24% of online teens use Twitter up, from 16% in 2011 (Madden et al, 2014).

This conversation roundtable will focus on the developmental, social, and health implications of adolescents’ fervent engagement with digital communication. Scholars from the fields of education, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, and social psychology will address why adolescents are so enthusiastically involved with digital communication, possible developmental benefits and risks of heavy involvement with social media, and digital stress. Panelists will discuss best practices for research on adolescents’ involvement with social media, including the ethics of using technology to observe adolescents’ digital communication. The discussion will examine whether parents, educators, and other adults have a responsibility to monitor adolescents’ digital communication and how we might socialize youth to use digital communication in the service of positive goals.

Sub Unit

• Social Relationships

Moderator

• Marion K. Underwood, University of Texas at Dallas

Panelists

• Emily C. Weinstein, Harvard University

• Kaveri Subrahmanyam, California State University

• B Bradford Bradford Brown, Univ of Wisconsin