You tell your children that they can go on Facebook if you can monitor, but later you find out you’ve only been allowed to see a dummy account.You set the password and they change it. You ban them from Facebook so they spend all their time on Tumblr, and once you finally figure out what Tumblr is they switch to another social media site. Keeping up with your child’s internet use can feel as futile as chasing the elusive White Rabbit across Wonderland — curiouser and curiouser, but a youth communications expert says keep trying.Dr Katie Davis, University of Washington Information School Assistant Professor, a former Bermuda High School student, is making a name for herself studying the online social media habits of young people in Bermuda and overseas.Parents can relax and stop worrying that their child has fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole. Dr Davis’ research has found that young people’s use of digital media isn’t all bad. It might actually be helping teenagers to reach developmental milestones, such as fostering a sense of belonging and sharing personal problems. She calls this ‘Friendship 2.0’, but the downside is that digital connectedness might be hindering the development of a healthy personal identity.“What they are doing is different from generations of teenagers from before the digital era, but it comes from the same place of basic developmental needs,” Dr Davis said. “It’s just that they’re using different tools to satisfy these needs.”She first became interested in the topic while in the doctoral programme at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2005. Her advisor, Dr Howard Gardner, was just starting a project looking at moral and ethical dimensions of media use.“I worked with him on the proposal for that project funded by the MacArthur Foundation,” she said. “Ever since then I have working on a number of programmes related to adolescent development and digital media.”When she first started researching the topic most parents didn’t even know what Facebook or MySpace were. (They are social networking websites, if you still don’t know. People get together on them to exchange news, views, photos and a lot of funny pictures of fuzzy animals.)“It is challenging for parents to keep up,” Dr Davis said. “It is hard to strike that balance between being vigilant with what children are doing online and making sure they are safe and allowing them room to grow and respecting their privacy.”Dr Davis said open communication between parents and children was really the key, as was setting ground rules for internet use. But she admitted that this is easier to do with younger teenagers than older teenagers.“I think that if you start with that base of good communication with children, even if they do go online without you, at least you can feel they are communicating with you openly about what they are doing. There is also a lot to be said for parents being good role models themselves. They themselves have to model proper online behaviour. They can do this by not using their own cellphones too much or posting inappropriate content on their Facebook page. They can model balanced lifestyles and respectful conduct online.”She said even she had trouble keeping up with all the new online social media websites popping up. It helped that she has two teenage sisters. They keep her updated on the latest developments and websites.Her study will be published in next month’s (November) issue of the ‘Journal of Adolescence’. As part of her research, she surveyed about 2,000 students in the Bermuda school system and personally interviewed more than 30 students from 13- to 18-years-old. Her technique for getting them to open up and share information was a devious one, but effective. She offered them pizza if they took part. As a result she had a high participation rate for her surveys.The study was funded in part by The Bank of Bermuda Foundation. She asked students about how they use media to communicate with friends, and found that Bermuda students are actually more digitally blinged out than their American counterparts. Ninety four percent of the Bermuda students she surveyed had cell phones compared to 75 percent of Americans. Ninety one percent of Bermuda students had Facebook pages. One negative outcome, she did hear from young people was that the internet, could be a distraction from more mundane tasks like homework.One 17-year-old student, Keisha, reported in the survey “[Facebook is] just like an addiction, I guess, like it’s hard, like if I don’t go on, I feel like I am missing something, like someone has written on my wall, and I can’t see what they are saying.”At Harvard University Dr Davis asked a group of freshmen to draw a pie chart of what they did all day. The results were startling. The internet took up a huge chunk of their time.“Across the board once they looked at how much time they spent online or on their cellphone they couldn’t believe it,” said Dr Davis. “Those little moments of opening your e-mail or Facebook during the day add up very quickly. Although there is a lot of learning to be had online, they often felt like they were wasting their time. They found it hard to find that balance. It takes a lot of discipline for young people which is hard because they are still developing that ability to show restraint and discretion.”She and Harvard University Professor of Education Dr Gardner, aim to publish a book next year about youth and social media. The book will look at how young people today are different from those in previous generations. It will also delve into how their sense of intimacy, imagination and identity has been impacted by the digital social media.“With identity, there are several different trends,” she said. “One of the interesting trends is the focus on the packaged self. If you think about whether you are Facebook or Tumblr you have time to groom yourself and how you come across online. Within a larger context such as celebrity culture, there is a lot of emphasis on appearance and putting forward a polished self. That is one of the trends we saw.”Although her research had not yet proved it, Dr Davis suspected that the constant connectivity between youth may support the development of an outward-looking self, one that looks to others for affirmation rather than relying on an internal sense of worth and efficacy.“Relying on others for self-affirmation suggests a relatively fragile sense of self, but our study doesn't say for sure that that is what is going on,” Dr Davis said. “What we can say is that adolescents are using digital media to promote their sense of belonging and self-disclosure of personal problems, two important peer processes that support identity development.”Her study also touched on cyber bullying. Thirty-seven percent of girls said they had experienced it compared to 28 percent of boys. Children who were online more than an hour a day were more likely to experience what they termed “drama” than those who spent less time. Children who had a close relationship with at least one parent were also less likely to experience cyber bullying.“Also schools play an important role,” she said. “Kids who experience school as a positive safe space are less likely to experience cyber bullying. For the most part students in Bermuda did seem to view their schools as safe.”Useful website: katiedavisresearch.com