Virtual Possessions Affect Teenagers

Digital imagery, Facebook updates, online music collections, email threads and other immaterial artifacts of today's online world may be as precious to teenagers as a favorite book that a parent once read to them or a t-shirt worn at a music festival, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers say. The very fact that virtual possessions don't have a physical form may actually enhance their value, researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and School of Design discovered in a study of 21 teenagers. A fuller appreciation of the sentiments people can develop for these bits of data could be factored into technology design and could provide opportunities for new products and services, they said. One of the subjects said she always takes lots of photos at events and uploads them immediately so she and her friends can tag and dish about them. The penchant of people to collect and assign meaning to what are often ordinary objects is well known. For their study, researchers recruited nine girls and 12 boys, ages 12-17, from middle- and upper-middle-class families who had frequent access to the Internet, mobile phones and other technology.

The researchers interviewed them about their everyday lives, their use of technology and about the physical and virtual possessions that they valued. If a house is a place to store your stuff, then a mobile phone might be considered a treasure box that gives you access to your stuff, the interviews revealed. The "placelessness" of virtual possessions stored online rather than on a computer often enhanced their value because they were always available. The degree to which users can alter and personalize online objects affects their value. Participants noted that they could display things online, such as a photograph of a boyfriend disliked by parents, which were important to their identity but could never be displayed in a bedroom. The online world, in fact, allowed the teenagers to present different facets of themselves to appropriate groups of friends or to family. Developing privacy controls and other tools for determining who gets to see what virtual possessions in which circumstances is both a need and an opportunity for technology developers, the researchers said.

More information:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110509113729.htm