Seeking Solutions for Enhancing Social Relations and Communication in Media-Dependent Children of the Digital Age

Introduction

New inventions and developments realized in communication technologies every day succeed in taking the users under their influence at an unprecedented pace. In this digital age in which regular individuals who are tech-users can immediately be influenced and convinced by technological devices, definitions are re-formed every day, daily habits change quickly, incidents and situations gain new definitions and individuals become the carrier and user of a single industrial culture. There are influences, and notions added by each new technological invention and device to social life and individuals from itself. Just as Neil Postman said, each technology has its own agenda and a tendency coming from its own nature. These technological devices with different agendas address individuals mostly by offering the same products and contents as turned into different formats and by reshaping them with its own agenda. However, in this period which makes this current age defined as the digital age, the most common point of technological devices is that they are in search of creating a new consumption market each day by promising to ease the lives of individuals. There is no doubt that in the current digital era, children constitute the largest consumption market. The reason is that children acknowledge and learn everything faster, and they put what they have learned into practice as a lifestyle. However, we should face the fact that this situation has a more negative impact on children than expected. These devices re-produced everyday place children inside the re-defined circle of socialization just like the adults they convinced with the promise of socializing and they drag them into anti-sociality by narrowing this circle every day. Having become media-dependent and started lading value to technological devices as friends instead of a real friend, children of today's digital age rapidly pass through the door to the virtual world and start to move away from a concrete and realistic world rapidly each day. The most distinctive characteristic of the children of this age who become increasingly the same by turning to similar habits and inclinations is that they increasingly become closed to communication and unresponsive. Other actional situations are focusing problems, the tendency to move away from the crowd, introversion, reluctance for group work, quick temper, frequently changing minds, the effort to instantly reach their wishes, inadequacy of self-expression and the inability to use linguistic expressions efficaciously.