Week 2 Reflection - Is today's adolescent Erikson's adolescent?

The image of what it means to be an adolescent seems to change with each passing decade, but the needs of the adolescent during the process of identity formation aren’t too different from the 1940s. The Forties, like Erikson’s Sixties, saw its share of teens on telephones, teen drivers, and teens getting ready to go to war after high school. Nevertheless, there remains the perception that the Sixties are where locomotor culture begins and parents’ hold on their teens’ whereabouts ends. If this is truly a dramatic change, then how different would today’s teenagers be from the teenagers Erikson describes in Identity? Overall, I believe that the fundamental nature of the adolescent hasn’t changed even since the Sixties. Many of Erikson’s ideas about adolescent development persist today, and using his framework helps me to make sense of my own experiences and observations. I see technology as a useful lens to observe how society works because I regard machines as simpler to dissect and rationalize than an unbounded ecosystem. Moreover, I don’t see cars, events, gathering spaces, or even phones now as fundamentally different from “back then.” 

Conversely, the efficiency and versatility of the technology used to promote social behavior has vastly improved and changed our perception of social interactions, effectively changing our perception of time and place. This is probably where Erikson would reason that while adolescent development remains the same, adolescents today are more susceptible to influences far outside the scope of the normal parent, classroom, and peer groups. Also, increased pressures placed on adolescents to perform in “competition culture” would force some to gradually withdraw from immediate societal connections in favor of online groups. The fact that adolescents online can more easily be swept into social movements or be bombarded with certain ideologies and constructs of identities would be dramatic, even troubling to Erikson.

As educators, it would be easy not to change our ways of using technology in the classroom since the education system largely hasn’t changed. Changes that do happen in the classroom are often due to rapid adoption of “good ideas” at the potential cost of using expedited studies (i.e. jumping to simple conclusions regarding complicated systems). I would interpret this as an apparent need to use technology to bridge a gap between a changing society and an anticipative adolescent. To Erikson, an adolescent’s rationalization of the world with their own prior internalizations is how trust is built, and a changing, contradictory world negatively impacts this trust.