Adolescents and emerging adults are faced with the developmental
task of establishing close relationships with their peers and intimate
relations with romantic partners (B. B. Brown & Larson, 2009). These
relationships reflect young people’s need to learn new patterns of
communication with peers, seek a position within a group, and share
their experiences. Adolescents report that friends are their most important
sources of social support, even more than their family (B. B.
Brown & Larson, 2009). Because it seems that Internet usage can
widen and strengthen the contact of young people with friends and
peers (Subrahmanyam & Smahel, 2011), the online communication
of youths can have a strong developmental impact.
Young people use the Internet frequently for communication
with peers, including strangers as well as friends (Smahel, 2003;
Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2008). The prominence of communication
in young people’s use of the Internet does not vary across
different countries (Subrahmanyam & Smahel, 2011). As data
from the World Internet Project indicate,1 Czech youths do not
differ in this sense from youths from the United States, Canada,
Singapore, Hungary, and China (Subrahmanyam & Smahel, 2011).
Although there are cross-cultural differences in the usage of dif