This book engages with contemporary, and often polarizing, debates surrounding the risks of adolescent use of digital media and internet technologies.
By drawing on multiple research studies, the text synthesizes current understandings of the impacts of social network use, online gaming, pornography, and phenomena, including cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and internet addiction, to develop recommendations for the effective identification of at-risk youth, as well as strategies for informed communication about online risks and opportunities. It shows how media discussion of risks to children and teenagers from new technology is highly emotive and often exaggerated, rooted in the "moral panic" surrounding new cultural practices that young people engage in, but which adults do not understand. Online risks are thus conceptualized as centering on three areas, specific to adolescence, which have undergone radical changes due to new internet technology. These include young people''s i
