How social media are changing community and identity

This cohort, aged between 15 and 32, has grown up with digital communications technologies, interacting with them in truly symbiotic ways. The technology has helped shaped how they think and act, and their values and habits have shaped the development of the tools they use.

In their excellent book The App Generation, Howard Gardner and Katie Davis describe how, for many Millennials, digital apps have altered the perception of reality.

Their lives as so entwined with apps, say the authors, that they've reached the point of seeing life as one overriding, cradle-to-grave app, a series of tasks to be fulfilled using an "overall packaged sense of self".

The online experience is central in shaping their identity and experience of others.

The authors propose that a reliance on social media may at times stunt the growth of young adults, by making it too easy to involve their parents in the smallest decisions of everyday life.

The average American college student living away from home now contacts mum or dad 13.5 times per week. This level of contact, facilitated by social media, would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

It's not just Millennials who rely heavily on digital tools in their social interaction. In recent times, across a number of regions of the world, the fastest uptake in Facebook membership has been among the over-50s.

Social media are useful in that they allow us to build a semblance of community at arms length. Yet some studies suggest that making social media a primary tribe-building mechanism leads us to expect more from technology and less from each other.

We carry out more and more of our conversations via machines and fewer via face-to-face connections. In the process, we may be allowing some of our relationship-building "muscles" to atrophy.

Baroness Susan Greenfield, the noted British neuroscientist, has studied how screen-based communication may be changing our brains. She is openly sceptical about the value of social networking platforms, particularly in terms of how they impact on our capacity for empathy.

Skype and its younger competitors usefully bridge the miles separating us from loved ones. Yet they do not allow anywhere near the same level of intimacy or as eyeball-to-eyeball interactions.

In conversation with a screen we do not use the full range of our natural biometric skills, including our normally unconscious ability to read minute facial expressions. The complexity involved in human conversation is what makes it both unique and rewarding.