Social networking's impact

"While older adults go online to find information, the younger crowd go online to live," reports NewScientist.com, in a thorough, multipart look at the social Web. Most interesting to me was MIT professor and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle's reflecting on the impact of social networking on individual users and society in further accentuating "the tethered self" – a person who understands himself and his feelings more in relation to others. "It seems to be part of a larger trend in media culture for people not to know what they think until they get a sense of what everyone else think.," Turkle says in the NewScientist interview. Parents, check out the example she gives: "Tethered adolescents are given a cellphone by their parents. In return, they are expected to answer their parents' calls. On the one hand, this arrangement gives the adolescent new freedoms. On the other, the adolescent doe not have the experience of being alone, of having only him or herself to count on: there is always a parent on speed dial. This provides comfort in a dangerous world, yet there is a price to pay in the development of autonomy. There used to be a moment in the life of an urban child, usually between the ages of 12 and 14, when there was a first time to navigate the city alone. It was a rite of passage that communicated, 'You are on your own and responsible.' Tethering via a cellphone buffers this moment; tethered children think differently about themselves. They are not quite alone." And time alone to digest, reflect, and form our own views - not just in relation to how our friends or fellow IM-ers or social networkers think – is a good thing.