Adolescent Ready for Technology: Biologically, Cognitively, and Psychologically

Adolescent Ready for Technology: Biologically, Cognitively, and Psychologically

As a member of the 21st century, we can no longer live independently without technology. It brings high-tech inventions such as cell phones and computers, which convenience our lives in many ways. The invention of internet changed our lives most as it provides us with many different platforms that allow us to exchange our emotions and memories with others, to have easier access to information and resources, and also communicate with someone that is on the other side of the world. It replaces our old learning and communication methods with high-tech inventions that enhance and improve our living quality.

However, internet also brings a lot of disadvantages. One of the most concerning problems among the usage of internet is that while you are traveling in this fictitious universe, your real identity is not important anymore. Within the digital world, you can be anyone, at any age with any gender, doing anything you like without taking much responsibility. With the increment of technology level, it is inevitable that children can get in touch with technology at an earlier age. Therefore, parents' guidance and Cyber law becomes the final fence to protect children from this uncontrollable hypocritical cyber world.

Among many of the popular social network platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Youtube and Google+ have establish age restrictions ordinance against user who are underage. For Facebook and MySpace, users have to be at least 13 years old to create an account; for Youtube users, they have to be at least 18 years old or older in order to watch those restricted videos; for Google+, since it is a complicated combination of online social network platform, Google requires its users to be at least 18 years old for creating and maintaining a profile. Some people, especially adolescents who have been restricted by the requirement, argue that the age restriction ordinance is not reasonable as people at all ages should have freedom to make use of any online resources for their own good. However, a larger group of people, including parents, socialists and psychologists agree with the age restriction ordinance as early adolescents (ages 11-14) and adolescents (ages 15-18) are not biologically, cognitively, and psychologically ready for receiving enormous information from the uncontrollable Cyber world.

The Adolescent Brain

Casey, Getz and Galvan (2008) defined adolescence as a "developmental period characterized by suboptimal decisions and actions that give rise to an increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases" (p.62). They addressed that adolescents behave disregarding the consequences on account of the immaturity of the limbic reward system and the top-down control system (Casey et al., 2008). They also attributed the reckless of adolescents to their immature prefrontal cortex and unfocussed function of their brains. Thus, in addition, Casey et al. (2008) depicted adolescence as a period of "progressively greater efficiency of cognitive control capacities" (p. 63), a period that prefrontal cortex get more mature by increasing activities within focal prefrontal regions and diminishing activities in irrelevant brain region which helps the transformation of a kid's brain into an adult mature brain. Casey et al. (2008) suggested that continual "dendritic arborization, synaptic pruning, and myelination" (p.67) that occurring during childhood and adolescence strengthen the connections between prefrontal and subcortical regions. These structural changes in frontostriatal regions allow greater cognitive control and self-regulation (Casey et al., 2008, p.73).

Since adolescence is a period that characterized by reward-seeking and risk-taking behaviors, plus their structurally underdeveloped brain, they behave less regarding to the consequences as an adult should be. This explain the reason why most of the biological psychologists agreed that the age restriction ordinances placed by online social network platforms as according to recent human imaging studies stated by Casey et al. (2008), adolescent brains are experiencing dramatic structural changes. While in the middle of the transformation into a total mature adult, adolescents are still biologically not ready for excessive online information especially platforms that might have chance to get in touch with too many personal thoughts of others as their reward-seeking and risk-taking preferences may fan them up to involve too much unnecessary emotional expenditure or even practice harmful behavior that cause implausible consequences.

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Brain is like the hardware of a human body while cognition (mind) of a person is the software that runs the normal function of the human. According to Casey et al. (2008), adolescents are not biologically ready for enormous information from the internet. According to the Piaget's stages of cognitive development (Shaffer, 2009), human before age 11-12 are still undergoing different stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor stage (birth to approximately 2year-old), preoperational stage (approximately 2 to 7 year-old), and the concrete-operational stage (7 to 11 year-old). While going through the stages, children are learning different cognitive skills that help perceive the world such as learning objective permanence (Shaffer, 2009, p. 55), the realization of an object that will continuously exist even they are no longer visible, in the sensorimotor stage; symbolic function (Shaffer, 2009, p. 57), the ability to use symbols to represent other objects and experiences in preoperational stage; and the development of relational logic (Shaffer, 2009, p. 61) between objects in the concrete-operational stage. Although individual variations have effects in cognitive development among children, kids upon age of 11-12 are able to combine logical and abstract thinking such as thinking more possibilities, thinking more about the process of thinking itself, thinking in multiple dimensions, and seeing things as relative rather than absolute. However, children upon this age are still suffering in a certain level of egocentric, who believe self to be invulnerable to negative events. Since their brains are not developed well yet, they may not able to think in others' perspective and might still can't think ahead to consequences of their actions.

However, when adolescents arrived at the age of 11-12 and reached the formal operational stage, he/she is now undergoing the final stage of cognitive development. In this final stage of cognitive development, abstract and hypothetical thinking

...