Life Narratives

Special examples of Life-span development

Social media across the lifespan

Pre-natal and Newborn

1. De Choudhury, M., Counts, S., & Horvitz, E. (2013, April). Predicting postpartum changes in emotion and behavior via social media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3267-3276). ACM.

2. De Choudhury, M., Counts, S., & Horvitz, E. (2013, February). Major life changes and behavioral markers in social media: case of childbirth. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 1431-1442). ACM.

3. Rodger, D., Skuse, A., Wilmore, M., Humphreys, S., Dalton, J., Flabouris, M., & Clifton, V. L. (2013). Pregnant women’s use of information and communications technologies to access pregnancy-related health information in South Australia. Australian journal of primary health, 19(4), 308-312.

• High use of social media can predict post-partum depression (1)
• Post-partum alters social media use-- less private engagement (2)
• “puppeteering mother"
• Information Resource (3)

Infancy

• Screen Time
  • American Academy of Pediatrics: None <2yo, Less than an hour 2-5yo
  • Baby Einstein
    • video deficit effect (present both for TV and Apps)
• Social media as a driving force for parenting
  • anti-vaccination movement
• Parent mediation through online services
  • intimate surveillance concerns
  • Rights of the child?

Early Childhood

Concerns for "Technologisation" of childhoods

Media literacy initiatives in response to and driving the digital divide

• Sociocultural
  • solitary, stunts social development
  • virtual experiences don't represent lessons for reality
  • Tech companies preying on vulnerable children
  • Parents preying on children  (e.g. Youtube)

Early Childhood

• Cognitive
  • Tech consumes cognitive resources better used elsewhere
  • Inhibition of imagination, increase in passivity
  • Linguistic development inhibited
• Wellbeing
  • Indoors instead of outdoors (sedentary instead of active)
  • Technology is addictive
  • Unsuitable content
  • Predators online
  • Reduce meaningful interactions, thus less attachment and emotional development

Middle-Late Childhood

• 56% children have a SM account before age 12 (set up by parent)
• Personal usage at around age 12.6 on average (80%)
• Recommended early use to be monitored
  • children are still in concrete operational phase
  • still addressing Industry v. Inferiority
• Under age 13, some protection on data allowed to be collected without parental consent.
  • Lying about age is legal and common

Adolescence

• "Digital natives" and trendsetters
• Counter-surveillance and parent/child conflict over SM
• Negative impacts of social media"
  • cyberbullying
  • imposter syndrome and relative well being
    
  • Low self-esteem
    
  • sexting🍑
  • correlated with anxiety/depression
    • Esp Facebook
  • correlated with suicide attempts
  • Lack of privacy protections
    • permanence of digital footprint
    • Corporate manipulations

Adolescence

• Benefits from Social Media
  • More socialization and supportive resources
  • May supplement social needs missing IRL
  • Greater perspective of community/political issues
  • Creative outlet
  • More learning opportunities (e.g. learning communities)
  • Access to taboo or embarrassing information (e.g. Puberty info)

• Group identity v. Alienation

• tension of "Broadcasting" and parent privacy

Emerging-Early Adulthood

• Correlated with staying in touch with family
  • Face to face preferred with friends
• College transition
• Intimacy v isolation
  • Social media seen as important part of dating
  • Dating apps generally after college
• Privacy becomes more of a concern, esp employers
• Network expansion

Middle Adulthood

• 56% on social media
• More vocational focus
• Focus on network maintenance
  • Less support-seeking
• Prefer more segmented social media presence
  • eg. Facebook for family, Twitter for fun, etc
• Less enjoyment and time on social media
• Parents interested in surveillance

Late Adulthood

• Use for reflection and tracking family
• Growing adoption, but least time spent online
  • Often set up by family members
• Tension between young and old
  • late adults want to track and support family
  • youth want to hide information from older family members

End of Life

• Digital  Mourning
• Data ownership after death
  • control of legacy
• The Poking Dead-- deceased will outnumber living n facebook