Week 2 Popular Media Review


Recently I’ve been thinking of how technology may continue to adapt, and how that will impact identity formation. The film Ready Player One deals with a futuristic world (set in Columbus) where people escape life through a virtual reality universe. They create entirely different personas and develop their closest friendships with complete strangers. The main characters in the movie were teenagers who, in the end, decided to shut down the virtual reality universe twice a week to allow everyone to spend more time in the real world. Though a world like this seems unrealistic, it does draw some interesting parallels to today’s world.

In my adolescence, the Sims were a popular video game. It allowed one to create a virtual character, often with the likeness of the individual. It allowed them to pick desirable characteristics, the perfect job, a family, etc. Now there’s countless other video games like this, and even virtual reality.

In my reflection post, I made the argument that technology has changed how adolescents communicate and develop but has not substantially changed what adolescence is. I wonder whether these types of video games may provide a new hurdle to understanding adolescence. Before these existed, teenagers would turn to other things to escape reality (reading, alcohol, etc.). But what could be the effects of these types of games where teenagers get to craft the ‘perfect’ identity online. How does this change their self-perceptions? Do they compare themselves to this online identity? How does this impact their self-esteem, not to mention their identity development? I think the continuing development of technology like this should be examined especially closely, as it could have concerning effects on adolescent identity formation.

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