2.  Remix

It may seem far fetched to draw a causal connection between the nature of digital information and the behaviour of individuals using it, but consider the following quotation from Wikipedia about Postmodernism, (bearing in mind that emerging adults are post-modern to the core.): Postmodernism represents 

a shift into hyper reality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus of many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. (emphasis added)[i]

Emerging adults do not just passively absorb this type of information but they actively evaluate it and customize or personalize it to suit their own lives.  They typically take individual bits and pieces of what they learn on the net and recombine them into their own constructions of a message for their life.  This is paradoxically simultaneously an act of independence on their part with respect to this information and an act of obedience to the demands of this information.  The very act of remixing the bits and pieces of what they learn into an organized whole subjectively experienced and produced by the users of digital information may be an act of independence ironically necessitated by the fragmented nature of digitalized information.

The end products of this evaluation and reconstruction remix process are opinions or statements of preference by emerging adults, who then communicate their opinions via the net by means of text messages, blogs or tweets to other emerging adults.  These in turn repeat the process for themselves.  They evaluate the information, choose and remix elements of it into a construction of their own, etc.  As a social process these activities are at least partially governed by the character of the digitalized information, the influence of which is so prevalent among emerging adults.

---

[i] This quotation was taken from an article on irony,

http://en.wikipedia.org/Postmodern_literature, p.8.