Adolescents' digital lives: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

The key message of this Special issue is that a more nuanced understanding and specification of digital technology use is needed, to gain a comprehensive understanding of adolescent's lives in a digital age (Livingstone, 2024). The digital context is rapidly increasing in the lives of adolescents and across society. Whereas a few decades ago, the digital activity of adolescents was constrained to television and earlier forms of computing and instant messaging on mobile phones, today sees adolescents engaging with a much wider set of digital activities and devices. The time spent on these devices is of great interest to researchers, as is what adolescents do on their devices. This activity sets new parameters for the digital context, making it more diverse and time consuming than ever before. Furthermore, the digital context in which adolescents develop spills over into the offline world. Interactions and interests forged in the online and digital world continue in the offline world, and aspects of the digital world are talked about and influence offline interactions and activity. In this perspective, the digital context is interwoven into the offline world, and it is hard to separate the two.To begin to understand this complex new reality, we need to consider differences in adolescents' characteristics (such as their age, social background interests and social and emotional capacities), the contexts in which they use digital tools, and the digital technologies themselves that can comprise different apps, networks and different regulations of their usage. Drawing on evidence from different data sources, the studies included in this special issue examine interactions between adolescent social and emotional wellbeing when using different digital technologies, as well as the role of parents, peers and teachers in shaping these interactions and associated outcomes. The findings suggest that the use of digital technology can in some instances be beneficial and in other instances detrimental for adolescent development, depending on characteristics of the individual, the context in which they use these technologies, and the different technologies used.A number of papers focused on associations between the use of digital technologies and well-being. A 7-day diary study by Scott et al. (2024) among Australian adolescents showed differences in the use of digital technologies for emotion regulation and their effectiveness depending on adolescents' emotional wellbeing (measured by indicators of emotional problems and loneliness). The question of whether socially anxious young people perceive social media as a less risky context than face-to-face interactions to express emotions in communication with their peers was addressed in the study by Angelini et al. (2024). Based on a sample of 1046 Italian students the findings suggested a potentially beneficial role of social media for those who are more socially anxious. In particular the absence of nonverbal cues (such as tone of voice or eye contact) was associated with a higher l...