7.      Emerging adults and their iPhones: why friends are important

Friendship relations are also governed by a focus on identity formation for emerging adults.  Away from home and family, emerging adults use meeting and living with friends mostly as a substitute for family life.  Friends provide them with social stability and some sense of community.  They look for friends any place they can find them, via online dating, through facebook, or via text messaging.   Through these means of computer technology they participate in a virtual community.  They are linked with other emerging adults through social networking, via email, blogging and twitter.  But it is all for the time being only as they vacillate between their need for identity and their need to belong, between becoming themselves and becoming connected. 

This fact needs some historical contextualization.  One major historical change over the last half-century is the explosion of information technology.  Its impact is especially evident among emerging adults.  They have whole-heartedly embraced all things digital and are the most tech savvy generation of all times.  This is another one of the characteristics that distinguishes them from previous generations.  The availability over the last several decades of personal computers, wirelessly connected laptops and cell phones or mobiles has given them access to the internet, email services, and information search engines like Google.  These instant information and communication technologies have easily made them the most informed and connected generation in history.  In addition, a vast array of social networking sites like facebook, my space, twitter and YouTube are at their disposal.  Emerging adults have enthusiastically taken these communication gadgets into their bosom and like prostheses have made them into extensions of their bodies.  I am told by many of them that they sleep with their cell phones on so that they can be on line 24/7.

All this has made them the most peer-oriented generation in history, as is evidenced by the high importance they place on unchecked self-expression and on the unconditional acceptance of self-expression by others via these social networking services.  Many emerging adults post personal profiles and videos of themselves on the net and update their status regularly.  They also avidly scrutinize and comment on the profiles of their many network friends.  They hunt the net for interesting videos and noteworthy tidbits of information and pass them on to their friends.  They text one another continually about the most mundane events of their day-to-day lives.  “I just had a lovely oatmeal breakfast.”   “I had eggs on toast.”  They spend a lot of their time emailing, blogging, or tweeting their opinions about anything in the world to their network friends.  All this in an attempt to provide a social- relational context, so necessary in their decade-long search for an identity.