Socialization of Youth in Natural And Virtual Context

With the development of technologies, virtual interaction contributes to the stronger virtual socialization of young people. This paper aims to examine how the virtual world influences the identity of young people. In the introduction, we reviewed the studies that dealt with virtual socialization, and then we presented a brief empirical insight into today’s socialization of young people from 14 to 21 years of age. With the questionnaire, we tried to examine the “quality” of virtual socialization in the lives of young people. The tasks of our research are focused on questioning the values that young people adopt through virtual socialization, an assessment of the “image of their own” that is in the virtual world, and the compatibility of the virtual identity with the one built in the family and peer environment. Respondents expressed views that their lives matched a life that points to social networks, while they felt that their peers did not live a life that they sought to portray on social networks. The results showed that they feel more secure in online communication than in life. Also, opinions are that the values they adopt are influenced by public opinion, etc. We can conclude that educating youths about the virtual world should be in several directions: actuality, truthfulness, privacy, and freedom.