Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
The data presented in the study is available upon request from the first author.
This study examines the research literature published from 2012 to 2022 on the relationship between increases in adolescent consumption of digital technologies and its impact on multiple areas of development, with a focus on how adolescent immersion in an increasingly ubiquitous digital world engenders positive outcomes in terms of brain, cognitive, and social-emotional development. The literature search yielded 131 articles, 53 of which were empirical studies of the relationship between increases in consumption of digital technology and brain development, cognitive development, or social-emotional development among adolescents. Overall, these studies identify positive outcomes for adolescents who use different types of digital tech, including the internet, social media, and video games.
Keywords: adolescent, development, digital technology use, positive outcomesToday’s youth are growing up in a world in which digital technology is ubiquitous and integrated into nearly every aspect of life. Basic human activities, including those related to education, socialization, and recreation, increasingly take place on digital platforms which have spawned new modes of engagement (e.g., socialization via social media, recreation, and learning via video gameplay). According to a recent research report based on a nationally representative survey among a random sample of tweens (8- to 12-year-olds) and teens (13- to 18-year-olds) in the United States, digital media use among teens, which varies across multiple demographic variables (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, and household income), is on the rise, up nearly 17 percent since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic [1]. It is estimated that, on average, adolescents today spend roughly eight and a half hours a day engaged with digital media, not including their use of digital technology for schoolwork [1]. The largest increases in digital media use have been in watching online videos, using social media, and browsing websites. Of these activities, both tweens (8- to 12-year-olds) and teens (13- to 18-year-olds) report that watching videos on YouTube is their favorite form of digital media activity, followed in order of preference by Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr [1]. On average, teens spend close to an hour and a half a day on social media [1]. Around a quarter of teens play video games on a console or computer daily, but nearly half report playing mobile games daily [1]. In terms of time spent, teens spend the most time watching videos, followed by gaming on various platforms, social media, and browsing websites. In terms of gender differences, boys use more screen media than girls and enjoy video games more; girls enjoy social media more than boys do. In a nationally representative sample of 743 teens in the United States, 97 percent of boys said they play video games compared to 83 percent of girls [2]. About 20 percent of teens regularly listen to podcasts. In the 21st century, digital engagement via various technological devices, platforms, and tools has become necessary for youth to accomplish key developmental tasks.
The saturation of the environment with digital media has prompted adjustments to established theoretical paradigms and birthed the field of media ecology, which examines how interactions with technology in the media environment shape, affect, facilitate, and impede human development. Importantly for this review, media ecology looks specifically at the impact on adolescent development when key developmental activities and interactions are mediated by digital technologies [3,4]. To accomplish this, media ecology draws on research in developmental psychology and Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development, a foundational paradigm for the fields of developmental psychology, applied psychology, pediatrics and childhood studies [5,6].
The bioecological model of human development views individuals as biosocial beings placed at the center of nested systems that reciprocally interact to inform developmental outcomes [6,7]. At the core of this theory is the focus on proximal processes, or the reciprocal interactions between the developing individual and persons, objects or symbols within the immediate ecological context [8,9]. Human development is thus characterized as a product of the transactional relationship between the developing individual as an active agent and drivers of development across ecological contexts [10]. Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model consists of five nested systems. The microsystem is the immediate environment in which the youth lives and includes any immediate relationships or organizations they interact with (i.e., caregivers, other immediate family members, school, or other places of care). Surrounding the microsystem is the mesosystem, which is essentially the different parts of the microsystem working together for the sake of the youth. For example, the mesosystem captures the interrelationships between the technologies youth engage with across home and school contexts. The exosystem includes other individuals and places that youth may not interact with directly but still influence development, including caregivers’ workplaces, extended family members, and the larger community context. Further, the macrosystem or outermost system of this model embodies sociocultural factors and ideologies that inform the ways in which youth development is supported across contexts [10]. This might include perceptions of tech engagement and misconceptions about influence that in turn dictate the extent to which youth engage with tech in the first place. Finally, the outermost system, or the chronosystem, captures the historical development of each system and the developing youth over time. This system is particularly important to consider given the historical advances in tech and the shifting discourse on digital tech effects on youth development.
Scholars are now updating the original bio-ecological framework to reflect how digital technology’s deep impingement into the microsystem and mesosystem impacts human development [11,12]. For example, Johnson and Puplampu [13] introduced the concept of the ecological techno-subsystem (see Figure 1 ). As a feature of the microsystem, this subsystem accounts for different types of technology and the interactions they support between the developing individual and others in their system (i.e., family, peers, teachers). This theoretical shift utilizes an ecological perspective to hone in on youth development while drawing from media ecology [14]. Media ecology focuses on the ways in which all types of media shape the psychosocial characteristics of individuals, recognizing the environment that media technologies provide for interaction and identity development [12,14]. Like the intent of this scoping review, a major question stemming from media ecology is how and why various forms of digital engagement facilitate or impede processes of development and in turn, developmental outcomes. Focusing on media ecology as part of the innermost nested subsystem of influence, the role of technology use in development becomes a critical element of consideration that warrants holistic exploration [12].
As a generation known as “digital natives”, [12,15] youth have choice and control in the type and frequency of which they engage with technology across ecological contexts that is unparalleled. The need to account for an additional zone that “mediates [the] bidirectional interaction between the child and the microsystem” in the most immediate developmental context underscores the profound influence of digital technology on child development in the 21st century.
There is a growing body of research literature that identifies positive outcomes for youth who use different types of digital technologies, including the internet, social media, and video games. This study provides a scoping review of the extant literature examining adolescent consumption of digital technology and its impact on brain, cognitive, and social-emotional development, with a particular focus on how their immersion in an increasingly ubiquitous digital world engenders positive outcomes across these outcomes of interest.
In keeping with the research literature on digital engagement and media effects, this literature review employs the concept of digital media as a superordinate term that encompasses the broad category of types of digital technologies, applications, devices, platforms, and tools. Information and communication technologies (ICT) is another term frequently found in the literature that is synonymous with digital media. Similarly, Crone and Konijn [16] simply use the term media to describe the “media-saturated world, where media is used not only for entertainment purposes, such as listening to music or watching movies, but is also used increasingly for communicating with peers via WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, Facebook, etc”. (p. 1).
This literature review employs the term digital engagement to capture youth’s “quotidian digital and online activity” and “the digital world”. Like digital media, digital engagement is “a broad concept of digital participation, which is not dependent on a specific technological device, platform, or tool” [17] (p. 102). An important aspect of adolescents’ and young adults’ digital engagement is captured by the concept of socio-digital participation (SDP) [18], which refers to participation in socio-digital activities via socio-digital technologies, defined as “the integrated systems of novel technological tools, social media, and the internet that enable constant and intensive online interaction with information, people, and artifacts” [19] (p. 16). Importantly, social-digital engagement is conceptualized as a participatory social practice reflective of adolescents’ lived experiences—and not merely acts of technology usage [19,20,21]. Typically, adolescents’ digital engagement activities are friendship-driven, interest-driven, or a combination of these digital engagement practices [21].
PRISMA is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in scoping reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses. In alignment with the PRISMA guidelines [22], the authors conducted a scoping review to source all literature with relevance to technology engagement and youth development. Articles were identified for possible inclusion from five relevant databases PsycINFO, PubMed, Google Scholar, PLoS, and PsychARTICLES; additional searches were conducted using Academic Search Premier, a large database that includes 8500 journals that cut across a range of scientific disciplines. Search terms included: Adolescen*, brain development, cognitive development, college and career readiness, communication skills, digital media, digital technolog*, learning, neuroplasticity, social development, social emotional, technology, youth. All searches included one search term related to technology (i.e., digital technolog*, digital media, technology) and a term related to a developmental outcome of interest (e.g., brain development, cognitive development). Terms were combined using AND when searches were intended to be inclusive of all terms (i.e., adolescen* AND digital technolog* AND cognitive development), while terms that can be interchanged were combined using OR (e.g., adolescen* OR youth). Results were limited to articles that were peer- reviewed and published between 2012–2022.
The authors conducted an initial screening of all identified articles using the following inclusion criteria: (a) empirical study or review of the literature, (b) examines the effects of the use of digital technologies (i.e., internet, social media, video games) on at least one developmental domain of interest (i.e., brain development, cognitive development, social-emotional development, mental health/well-being). The initial search yielded 131 articles, of which 73 were excluded due to the criteria described above (see Figure 2 ). Fifty-three articles were fully reviewed between three of the authors. Inclusion decisions were made using a consensus approach where each article was discussed between at least three authors in a group format and then determined by the group to be included or not. Table 1 provides a summative overview of the selected articles organized by developmental domains of interest.
