Psychosocial Issues and New Possibilities
In his book, Growing Up Digital, Tapscott tells the story of a 7-year-old girl (I’ll refer to her as Alice) confined to a hospital because of a rare skin disorder. The girl says she has only one friend because the other kids are afraid of her. That all changed when she first logged on to Ability On-Line, a network of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. The response she received was overwhelmingly positive and her new peers quickly told their new 7-year-old pal that she had just made a lot more friends (Tapscott, 1998 ).This example underscores how the ability of the Internet to connect geographically distant children can eradicate the sense of isolation and insecurity that they normally feel in the presence of others. When children with initially low self-esteem find that others are responding positively or otherwise to their ideas and thoughts, they are immediately more confident.
The connection need not even be with people sharing that same sense of isolation. In the “real-world” it might be hard for even a well-meaning individual to carry on a conversation with a girl such as Alice without unintentionally letting their knowledge of Alice’s condition affect their treatment of her. On the Internet, though, Alice, and anyone else for that matter, can carry on a conversation about anything they like without having to be constantly reminded of any labels that are normally attached to them. While it is certainly true that children eventually do need to learn to deal with the harsh realities of the “real world”, it doesn’t hurt to give them a head start by letting them discover that they have reason to be confident in themselves. Perhaps, then cutting or insulting remarks or looks won’t cut quite as deep!
| More on Child-Parent Dynamics: | Psychosocial Benefits |
| A Girl Named Alice | Filtering Mechanisms |
| Advertising | References |
From the
Flinstones to the Jetsons:
How Technology is Sprocketing the American Family into the New
Millennium
| PROJECT HOME PAGE | Computer and Internet Demographics by Jason Stewart |
| The Cyber-Struggle Between Parents and Children by Julie Carvey | Gender Roles In
Cyberspace by Leslie Simon |
This project was produced for Psy 380, Social Psychology of Cyberspace, Spring 1999, at Miami University. All graphics in these pages are used with permission or under fair use guidelines, are in the public domain, or were created by the authors. Last revised: . This document has been accessed times since 1 May 1999. Comments & Questions to R. Sherman