Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

1.25.10 | The January issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research has a number of interesting articles, including one that looks at how normative developmental processes shape individuals’ blogging practices during adolescence and emerging adulthood.

For the study “Coming of Age Online: The Developmental Underpinnings of Girls’ Blogs,” Katie Davis, a doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education, interviewed 20 young women, ages 17 to 21, who have been blogging for at least three years. Davis conducted the interviews as a researcher on the GoodPlay Project, which explores the ethical dimensions of young people’s activities using new digital media.

The full article is available by subscription or a one-time payment; the abstract is available here.
 
Putting her study in the context of other studies of youths’ online activities, Davis found that the changes in the content and style of the blogs themselves reflect the long-understood changes in social and cognitive development in youth.

When they first started blogging, the girls were unsure what to write and looked to their friends’ blogs for guidance. Over time, they became more self-assured and developed their own style of writing. Although they no longer rely on their friends for guidance, friends continue to function as a primary motivation for blogging. By considering this evolution in light of developmental theory, I found that the girls’ changing blogging practices parallel normative milestones in adolescents’ and emerging adults’ developing sense of self and peer relationships.

Thus, although youths’ enthusiasm for blogging may confound and disturb many adults, it seems their engagement in blogging communities like LiveJournal reflects typical developmental imperatives of adolescence and emerging adulthood.

In fact, it is clear from the interviews that blogging allowed the girls, when younger, to explore a variety of possible identities and, when older, to gain confidence about their future roles in society.

The social and cognitive growth of the young women might be reflected most impressively in the growth of their writing skills, especially in terms of developing their own voice. Davis writes:

The embarrassment that the girls expressed over their earlier writings stood in contrast to the sense of stability and confidence they displayed when describing their current writings. Such self-assuredness is common among emerging adults, whose well-being tends to increase as their anxiety over peer acceptance and self-definition decreases (Arnett, 2004; Roberts et al., 2001).

The girls spoke about their comparatively calm tone of voice and improved quality of writing. Moreover, while friends continue to play an important role in their blogging practices, girls like Maggie and Veronica explained that they have found their own style of writing. They no longer look to their friends’ blogs to help them shape their own blog.

The girls may be less reliant on their friends for guidance on LiveJournal, but friends remain central to their blogging experiences. Reading and responding to their friends’ blog entries is a daily activity for most girls, whereas writing on their own blog is somewhat more intermittent. This pattern of LiveJournal use can be understood by placing it in a developmental context.

The conventional approach to an analysis of youths’ online activities is to discuss how the youths’ online world affects their offline, “real” lives (in supposedly detrimental ways). Davis, instead, worked with the assumption that youths’ offline development determines, to a great degree, how they will approach and engage with the online world—and how both worlds ultimately complement each other.

Readers interested in youth and blogging may also be interested in the article “Self-Presentation and Interaction in Blogs of Adolescents and Young Emerging Adults,” which appears in the same issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research. Here’s the abstract.