Online friendships more complicated than earlier thought

My children don’t spend a ton of time online, but they do communicate with their friends on the internet via MySpace. With all the spooky talk that TV pundits spout, particularly about MySpace, you would think that the internet is a space-age demon. It isn’t: as with anything else, it depends upon how the internet is used. A study last year in Cyberpsychology Behavior (yes, there is such a journal) looked a what influences online friendship formation. It also attempted to look at motives for online communication as potential explanations. Drawing on a sample of 493 adolescents, the study tested a path model of adolescent friendship formation. As predictors, it included introversion/extroversion, online self-disclosure, motive for social compensation, and frequency of online communication. The analysis showed that extroverted adolescents self-disclosed and communicated online more frequently, which, in turn, facilitated the formation of online friendships. Introverted adolescents, by contrast, were more strongly motivated to communicate online to compensate for lacking social skills. This increased their chances of making friends online. Among introverted adolescents, a stronger motive for social compensation also led to more frequent online communication and online self-disclosure, resulting in more online friendships. The study concluded that the antecedents of online friendship formation are more complex than previously assumed.

When you think of it, the findings make sense. It is not hard to imagine a shy, introverted adolescent using the internet for social compensation. On the other hand, the results of the study are fairly disturbing, Although we monitor our children’s time on the internet I still worry about the predators who lurk online waiting to chat with innocent kids.

Text Messaging alerts parents of truants

Skipping school just got a bit harder for some Tucson-area students. Several high schools in the area are using a text-messaging system to alert parents of truant students.

The system, called “Messageyou,” is already in use in Australia. Messageyou sends a text message to parents that have signed up for the program, telling them the child has an unexcused absence.

Oftentimes, parents are hard to reach by phone and cunning students erase messages left on the voice mail.

Or the kids could just do what I did and have ahem, “valid” excuses, as to why they were absent.