Identity and Adolescence in a Digiphrenic Era

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” 

― Oscar Wilde

“I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me--they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could.” 

― Veronica Roth, Allegiant

“I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.” 

― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

What is identity? The meaning of identity has changed over the years as the more developments human beings achieve, the more likely that these changes affect and shape our identity. It conventionally refers to “people’s concepts of who they are, of what sort of people they are, and how they relate to others” (Hogg and Abrams 1988, p.2). It uncovers the peculiarities and features that distinguish every individual from another one. These traits may include religion, ethnicity, gender, age, language, culture, etc. However, globalization, interculturality and technological developments have reshaped the meaning and the construction of one's identity. Nowadays generation has got different identities and sometimes multiple ones which make you feel that we are living in a schizophrenic era.

The 21^st century has revolutionised the basic traits of human’s daily life due to its versatile and digitalized characteristics including the Internet, technological devices, connected lives, glocality, etc. This has basically caused many critical changes within one’s identity especially teenagers’ who are mostly affected by the facets of the virtual worlds on social media. Teens are faced by myriads of influences on the virtual world which impacts and manipulates how they view, develop and present themselves. The utilisation of the Internet and Social Networking Sites (SNSs) created a new wave of identities called digital or electronic ones. This identity type is comprised of certain attributes such as username, password, and other personal information that should be all uploaded on the Internet in order to create a personal profile that represents one’s individual identity. Accordingly, this step is the first stage towards forming and establishing a new identity.  

Although it may seem moronic to believe that social media may affect adolescents’ group and individual identities, the fetishization of being attached to the Internet has changed the function of one’s identity. Facebook, Twitter, Viber, and other SNSs are playing a pivotal role in the development of teenagers’ personality and identity.  Being offline in an adolescent life is totally different from being online which can lead to serious problems regarding identity construction and development resulting in the creation of multiple and deceiving identities. In this perspective, Greenfield says “this group doesn't differentiate. They see their real-time identity and their online identity as identical when in fact they're not". Another important factor is that technology and the Internet do not allow its users to form one unique identity as there are several selves that are interacting online and offline. Hence, the user cannot know which one of these selves is its real identity causing a serious enigma. 

The problem does not stop here as the multiplicity of selves has brought into being a new phenomenon called “Digiphrenia” or “Digital Schizophrenia”. The latter refers to the state of being in a dual personality, lost between the virtual and the real world. Douglas Rushkoff defines it as “the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There’s your twitter profile, your email inbox and all these sort of multiple instances of you simultaneously and in parallel.”  This mental abnormal activity causes psychological health problems, decreased social and emotional intelligence, low relationship management skills, poor personal and academic self-regulation, etc. The majority of adolescents are vulnerable to digiphrenia as they are the first to be affected due to their excessive use of mobile phones and social media. Hence, it is important to sensitize them vis-à-vis the hazards of being connected all the time and how can social media affect their process of constructing their identity and personality.

As final words, the virtual world is a dangerous cosmos where an individual may lose his/her real self. Conjointly, teenagers have the most susceptible subjectivities as their age does not provide them with the needed experience to face the riskiness of the 21^st century age. As a corollary, parents should be seriously aware of the lineaments of this novel world and its drawbacks that may impact their children in various ways.  Accordingly, Steiener-Adair declares that "a lot of parents think that because they (don't) understand tech, they throw up their hands. You don’t have to know (exactly how technology works) to set the right kinds of limits". Parents should always check after their children and guide them because this newly-digital based world can destroy many adolescents and cause several psychological issues for them.