Sunday Tribune

Online forums pose risks, but they are also important sources of support

BENJAMIN KAVELADZE

ARISTOTLE called humans “the social animal”, and people have recognised for centuries that young people need to be in communities to develop into healthy adults. The pandemic has caused concern about the effects of isolation on children and teenagers’ social and psychological growth.

But while young people today may not be able to gather in person as often as they’d like, they aren’t necessarily isolated. They have long used online communities to explore their identities and conduct their social lives.

They’re involved in anonymous hip-hop discussion forums, ADHD support groups on Facebook, biology class group chats on Instagram and comments sections under popular Youtube videos. There are many online communities, and collectively they cover a wide range of subjects. They’re also often central to their users’ lives.

However, parents, educators and psychologists frequently argue that these spaces can cause young people distress and even expose them to dangerous ideologies.

With online communities now perhaps more important to young people than before, the question of what it means to grow up in online communities bears closer scrutiny. As a psychology researcher who studies online communities, I and my colleagues have found that in addition to posing widely publicised risks, online communities can provide young people with social and psychological support that’s unavailable to them at home, at school or in their neighbourhoods.

Formative but risky

Those of us who grew up engaged in online communities know how formative the spaces can be. As a 24-year-old who has used the internet nearly every day since I was 6, I can think of several key moments in my psychosocial development that took place in online communities.

Some of the moments were painful, like my cousin scamming me out of my hard-earned armour in the online role-playing game Runescape when I was 10.

Others were joyous, like my first show Djing for an online radio station at 12. And many were strange but fascinating, like going onto the 18+ video chat site, Chatroulette, with my friends at 13 to interact with strangers.

Observing and participating in online communities’ rich, ever-evolving cultures shaped my interest in pursuing psychological research.

Although the Covid-19-related constraints kids are facing are new and hopefully temporary, caution about immersing them in online communities is justified. Online communities change the ground rules of human interaction, enabling unprecedented social experiences with unpredictable impacts on malleable minds.

Popular criticisms, such as the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma, have argued that social networking sites like Instagram warp young users’ perceptions of reality, causing them psychological distress.

A particular concern is that young people compare themselves to a constant stream of peers’ cherrypicked successes and algorithmically augmented selfies.

As online communities evolve, coming generations will continue to lead the way in redefining the roles the spaces play in their lives. |

LIFESTYLE

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2021-06-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

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