in real world skills, is being primed for a constant need for outside affirmation rather than a stable sense of self rooted in a deep understanding of her dignity and her experience of success in varied arenas.
A child may be further impeded from fitting in or being “liked” if his family lacks the resources to provide him with the latest technology. In these situations, access itself can lead to a sense of inferiority. Children who don’t have access to the latest game or the latest device can begin to feel less than their peers if everyone around them is talking about a new game. But at $20 to $60 a pop, the latest game becomes expensive or even impossible for families who are struggling to make ends meet financially.
For teenagers, Erikson recognizes the importance of developing a core identity. Children from twelve to eighteen years old are trying to figure out their place in the world. This sense of self doesn’t develop in a vacuum, but rather grows from the encounters they have had with others such as family members, friends, or anyone else they deal with in the course of their day — be it a surly teacher, a quirky next-door neighbor, or their boss at an after-school job. We all need to interact with other people if we want to understand how we fit in. Teenagers, who start off as awkward and gangly adolescents in junior high, grow in confidence as they learn how to interact with others, and real-world encounters are crucial to this development.
Of course, there is a difference between being confident and reaching reasonable conclusions, but this might not be on the radar for most seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds. For example, my backup plan if I didn’t get into college was to be a pirate (I blame the cardboard boxes I mentioned earlier). Several friends and I, realizing that college was expensive, decided (prudently) that we didn’t want to waste money by going to college uncertain of what we wanted to do with our lives. I proposed that we (or our parents or whoever was going to help us pay for college) invest that money in a replica of a Spanish galleon, and we’d be good to go. We could gallivant around the Caribbean doing … well, we never got that far in the plan. So while we didn’t have a clear sense of what we wanted to major in, we were pretty confident that we knew who we were. Prospective pirates without a ship!
What we were, in reality, was a bunch of guys who were anxious about the future and developed a funny way to deal with it. That became a form of identity, coping with worry through humor. We knew where we fit in to the world, or at least we were comfortable enough with ourselves that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously while we figured things out.
Back to Erikson. The hope is that by the time our kids go to college, they have a sense of what this whole relating-to-people thing is all about. Currently, however, many professionals believe that Erikson’s identity stage continues easily into the mid- to late twenties in a prolonged adolescence. What Erikson saw as the capacity to fully develop an understanding of identity and relationships may not completely form until the end of an “Emerging Adulthood” stage that psychologists now propose takes place from eighteen to twenty-six years of age (it is beyond the scope of our discussion to speculate what role technology, as well as the current college culture, might have to do with this change). In any case, teenagers are still learning how to be in relationships, and many of them now see technology as being a fundamental element of those relationships. In some cases, entire friendships and romantic relationships are built online, calling into question the authenticity of such a mediated encounter as well as the opportunity to grow in person-to-person communication and interaction.
Relationships as Genuine Encounters
Catholic teaching reveals to us that our understanding of human relationships is (or should be) modeled on the relationship of God within the Holy Trinity – what theologians would describe as a “communion of love” and a “total self-gift” between the Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such, a genuine encounter is necessary in order to affirm the God-given dignity of the other and make a gift of oneself, giving and receiving love. I acknowledge your dignity as being made in the image and likeness of God, and I offer myself to you. I also acknowledge my own dignity as someone valuable and worthy of your time and attention. Basically, both persons see themselves as having something of value to give the other, and simultaneously accept what the other offers them. It might help to think of this exchange as a gift. When we give ourselves and receive the gift of others that they present to us, we are involved in a genuine encounter. That ultimately leads us to Christ, as it is Christ who fully reveals us to ourselves. This means that everything — including our relationships — find their meaning and purpose in Him. This is what is at stake when we discuss the difference between a genuine encounter and an encounter mediated by technology, which fails to satisfy the longing of the human heart, whether it be our children’s or our own.
As we have seen, digital technology has a substantial impact on the psychosocial development of children of all ages, and social media stands between people, often blurring the line between friend and stranger so that the genuine encounter that helps to develop identity is replaced with something less authentically human. Recognizing this, we are ready to explore how broad this impact may be.
For Reflection
When, with whom, and how does our family experience the gift of “genuine encounter” with others?
What are some ways we work to nurture each family member’s individual identity in relation to our family, parish, and community?
How does our family follow Christ’s teaching to love one another?
Chapter Three
Virtually Alone
A dictionary definition of social media might look something like this: social media — electronic interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange ideas in virtual communities and networks.
“Virtual communities” is a key element in this definition — by nature these can be, and often are, far-flung “communities.” While they might be united around a shared interest, the relationships are mediated electronically and can lack the context typically found in more “local” or face-to-face relationships. As Thoreau pointed out when he wondered whether, with the advent of the telegraph, Texas and Maine would actually have anything to say to each other, information without context loses some of its value.
Social media allow us to easily send an unparalleled amount of information to people who may (or may not) be particularly interested in that information or have the background to understand it. In turn, we can receive an equally vast amount of information that we may (or may not) find fascinating.
The odds are pretty good that you’ve seen, or at least heard of, all the major social media sites. Facebook is currently the most popular, with more than 2 billion active monthly users, including more than 1.33 billion people who use the site daily. Facebook is a personalized web page that allows users to stay in touch with friends, relatives, and other acquaintances wherever they are in the world as long as there is an internet connection. YouTube is another popular site and allows users to post favorite music videos, video diaries, hilariously ill-conceived karaoke attempts, and more user-generated content than you could view — or want to view — in a lifetime. Twitter is a microblog that limits a user to 280 characters per “tweet.” Tumblr is also a microblog, though less popular currently than Twitter. Both of these are used to send tiny bits of text or video outward into cyberspace, making our computers and cell phones something like personal broadcasting stations. Finally, Instagram users typically post pictures and videos for their followers rather than blasts of text. Undoubtedly you’ve heard of all or most of these — and so have your kids. They likely know of more (Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Vine). As an aside, Facebook isn’t a current favorite
