%0 Book Section
%T Adolescence and identity in the twenty-first century: social media as spaces for mimesis and learning
publisher Springer Nature Switzerland AG
%D 2022
%U 978-3-030-85788-2
%U 978-3-030-85787-5
%@ https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/104480
%X The object of this chapter is to explore the role that online social networks or so-called social media play in the formation of identity among twenty-first-century teenagers. McLuhan in a now famous phrase said that “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” (M. McLuhan, in The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, ed. by J. Stanlaw, (Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, 2020)). In that sense, social media, which function as a new tool for establishing interpersonal relations, are not merely a handy and neutral element among the several that form adolescent identity but mark that identity through their use. Having a handful of medium- to high-intensity relationships with friends that one sees periodically is not the same as having hundreds of relationships with persons with whom contact takes place only online and which absorb a great amount of time and preoccupation. The demands and codes of the latter are different from those required by face-to-face relationships, and the self-image that they help form is also different.
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