Children, Adolescents, and the Internet: A new field of inquiry in developmental psychology

With this special section on children, adolescents, and the In-ternet, we survey the state of a new field of enquiry in develop-mental psychology. This field is important because developmen-talists need to understand how children and adolescents live in a new, massive, and complex virtual universe, even as they carry on their lives in the real world. We have selected six empirical articles to showcase various aspects of child and adolescent development in this virtual universe. These articles reflect three major themes of this new field: 1. Communication on the Internet. Two articles analyze how adolescents interact to co-construct their own com-munication environments. These environments can be, on the one hand, mostly “normal ” (Subrahmanyam, Sma-hel, & Greenfield’s analysis of behavior in teen chat rooms) and, on the other hand, mostly pathologica