The 'overconnecteds'?

The New York Times cuts right to the chase and asks the question we adults have had for some time: “What are the psychological implications of simultaneously talking to 50 of one’s forever best friends, who are not actually present?” Answer: We don’t know yet. That’s my take-away, anyway. The other takeaway from this long article: how very individual teens’ online social experiences and their impacts are. But there’s a list of “practical advantages” to all this connectedness for teens at the bottom of p. 2. One of them is, “If someone seems to be in trouble, there are no longer just one or two good friends to the rescue but hundreds who send support via email messages, instant messages and text messages.” Elsewhere in the piece, one teen source told the Times that her peers are “stronger socially” than adults because of the way they use electronic communications, mostly IM, partly because people aren’t inhibited by appearance and facial expressions. They feel more confident going into face-to-face conversations after the ice has been broken in IM. But of course there’s a flipside, to that “invisibility,” or lack of visual cues, in not knowing how one’s comments are being received. For an example of an overconnected wannabe, see this story in the Wichita Eagle about a 20-year-old Wichitan who aims to have all of the “approximately 500 Hispanics he found on MySpace within 20 miles of ZIP code 67212” on his friends list. “So far he has about 100.”