Adolescence and Identity in the Twenty-First Century: Social Media as Spaces for Mimesis and Learning

Abstract

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.