Young People Identify With an Online Community Almost as Strongly as With Their Own Family

According to a Science Daily article, young people identify with an online community almost as much as they do with their own family. The study was authored by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Professor Pekka Räsänen from the University of Turku, Finland.

It shows that online communities are an important part of a modern adolescents social growth. This may be surprising to many parents since they didn't have anything like this when they were growing up so their encouragement is likely to be in favour of other activities that they are more familiar with. My daughter is only two years old and I can't imagine having her chat online to people but I'm sure it will happen sooner than I expect.

The biggest concern I would have for my daughter is the reduction in exercise that would come with spending all of your time in front of a computer instead of being out with mates. I think that my concern might be misplaced since mobile phones are replacing computers as the way that people interact with social networking sites. For example, I can't remember the last time I logged in to twitter from a browser. I do most of my interaction through my mobile phone app. The bad news isthat I am getting no more exercise since I've started using the mobile phone app versus when I accessed these services from my computer so this thinking doesn't stand up to my empirical evidence.

Online communities will continue to be an important part of everyone's lives moving forward though so, exercise or not, they are here to stay.

The study, titled "How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between United Kingdom, Spain and Japan", is published by the Journal of Youth Studies.