Introduction

Developmental theories assume that at the beginning stages of adolescence, young people's developmental tasks and the instability of their ‘selves’ motivate them to experiment with their identities and self-presentation. There is growing evidence that adolescents use the internet to experiment in this way, especially on social networking sites (SNS) (Calvert et al, 2003; Valkenburg et al, 2005; Williams and Merten, 2008). This experimentation should gradually decrease as children get older and fulfil their developmental tasks, that is, younger children should experiment more than older ones (Valkenburg et al, 2005; Livingstone, 2008) – the closer to the goal, that is, being adult, an adolescent is, the stronger should be his/her motivation to complete a developmental task.

Experimenting with the self is considered here as experimenting with self-presentation online. It is defined as pretending to be someone else, of another gender, practised more often by boys than girls, or, more commonly, of a different age (Calvert et al, 2003; Valkenburg et al, 2005; Valkenburg and Peter, 2008; Williams and Merten, 2008). For example, some girls want to be perceived as younger and nicer while others want to present themselves as older or attractive (Calvert et al, 2003; Valkenburg et al, 2005). Of course, teenagers are working out who they really are. Experimentation is about necessary and constructive exploration and discovery rather than deceit. Motivations of experimentation include social compensation (i.e. to overcome shyness, communication difficulty or other weaknesses), self-exploration (i.e. taking various personality features or identities to investigate how others react on an adolescent), and social facilitation (to facilitate dating, making friends and relationship formation).

Research aims and methods

The first part of the chapter explores the hypothesis that this experimentation is common. We also hypothesise that age matters substantially, being less prevalent among older children. Our third hypothesis predicts that experimenting with self-presentation online is more common among boys for two reasons: boys are developmentally further from adulthood than girls of the same age (Allison and Shultz, 2001; Lerner and Steinberg, 2004; Sax, 2007), thus they feel more pressure to pass through consecutive developmental stages; and boys undertake more online activities measured in terms of variety, frequency and length of time ( Jackson, 2008; Gui and Argentin, 2011), so they are also more likely to experiment online.