ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the risks and opportunities associated with new types of personal connections online. In preadolescence, a natural tendency to form new social networks is reflected in changing patterns of technology use, with a gradual shift away from solo game-playing and toward new interpersonal connections. Then, as teenagers pass through adolescence, they tend to show increased interest in the other sex (or an increasingly romantic interest in their own sex if they are homosexual), a development which, of course, can bring much anxiety for parents. These days such interest is reflected in changing patterns of use of social networks like Instagram and Snapchat, and eventually of online dating apps such as Tinder. This chapter therefore draws on a study I conducted with Tinder users in Colombia and the United States, and a review of research on Tinder use. Themes include the evolutionary origins of the differences between women’s and men’s self-expression in dating apps, changes in this self-expression during adolescence as young people gain more experience of interactions with potential partners, and the extent to which cultural and personality differences affect the use of such apps. New social connections in adolescence unfortunately also raise the possibility of unwelcome forms of interaction such as cyberbullying and online sexual harassment (including disturbing new phenomena such as revenge porn and sextortion). Cyberbullying is associated with particular risks due to its inescapability, the tendency for certain individuals to become perpetrators who would be reluctant to perpetrate face-to-face bullying, and the possibility for online mob situations to develop where individuals take part in victimizing without even knowing the victim or necessarily realizing the gravity of what they are doing. Again, however, concerns about cyberbullying have something of the character of a moral panic, since bullying is by no means a new phenomenon and cyberbullying simply represents its expression in a new environment. Finally, I discuss the establishment of new social connections in an increasingly globalized world. A large body of literature shows that children can naturally learn second languages and acquire useful information about other cultures through their interactions in online games. An online version of the “contact hypothesis” suggests that young people’s online interactions, as they grow up in an increasingly globalized culture, have the potential to help solve many of the problems of nationalism and cultural intolerance that we are currently seeing in adult society.
