Too Many Apps, Too Little Time
The Trend
For the younger generation, communication through apps has replaced text messaging and phone calls. The above image is a photo of the common room whiteboard in one of the girl's dorms during the summer session at ASP, 2017. When students arrived, and throughout the summer, they connected via Snapchat. Not only is this totally normal, it's actually preferred by teenagers. It's easy to ask someone for their Snapchat or Instagram. And that's not just because Snapchat gives you a handy QR code for others to add you, it's because teenagers spend more time in that app than they do in text. And more followers means more time on the app talking to friends! That's true of Instagram too, where more followers generally means more likes. And both of these apps allow messaging. Therefore, teenagers don't need someone's phone number when they first connect.
This makes sense to me as a millennial; Facebook was huge for connections in college, but without Facebook messenger, we had to share numbers. And then we communicated via text, a lot. Texting is ubiquitous to Millennials. The generations above us lament the death of the face-to-face conversation and the phone call. Is it now our turn to lament the death of the text message?
Texting is not dead per se, teenagers still text; it's just that this younger generation has so many more options in how it connects. More often than not members of the younger generation send disappearing text and photos through Snapchat. Or they chat on Facebook Messenger. Or they send encrypted communication on What's App. Or they DM on Instagram. Teenagers are all living through a unique era where a number of applications provide connections that are very different from the standard SMS that sustained the social (and now professional) lives of millennials and it's drastically impacting their lives.*
The Impact
on Health
Given all the ways in which teenagers connect, an individual needs to keep up with a number of apps in order to stay informed. And each app has its own social norms, lexicon, and pitfalls. To be a savant on every one of these apps would be unbelievably time consuming. Heaven forbid a teenager makes a mistake or misreads a digital social cue in one of these spaces. Such a mistake would no doubt be permanent. Given the decreasing cost of data storage, it's safe to assume every message sent and application used is saved permanently.
The amount of stress and anxiety that this social life produces is drastically affecting our teenagers. As Jean Twenge argues in her book iGen, the increase in stress and anxiety comes as our teenagers go out less, drink less, have less sex, spend less time doing homework, have fewer jobs, and are involved in fewer extracurricular activities (I highly recommend iGen for more on the mental stress provided by these applications).
On Schoolwork
In high school, teachers are supposed to connect with students via email, but understanding the current messaging landscape helps me understand why students rarely write back. Email is not an application teens use to connect with each other, so they only use it begrudgingly to connect with teachers. It's just one more application that they have to manage, and it almost never delivers the endorphin rush of other apps.
The other major impact on our schools is the distraction (and trouble) caused by group messaging. Whether a Snap group, a WhatsApp group, a Facebook group, A Skype group, a Discord board, or an old-fashioned SMS Group Chat, our teenagers are engaged in several messaging groups at once. This monopolizes a lot of their time. At any given moment, one member can fire off a few messages, and before you know it, the whole group of 5, 10, or 15 students is side-tracked during class.
On my classroom
If you read this blog, you know that I require my students to create a social media account to keep up with the content inside and outside of the curriculum. I've written about how I've done that in my history classes, my media classes, and in my elective that's called, "Passion-Based Learning through Social Media." I do this so students can build personalized learning networks and learn beyond the confines of my classroom. I think of these exchanges and activities as social connections that enhance learning, but that's not how this generation sees it. I still believe strongly in why I ask my students to do this and what they get out of it, but my students are less interested every year. I know that's because they're limited by how many apps they use effectively and by the social and educational demands that their screens already require.
While I feel like I'm connecting with my students on their terms, in their preferred applications, and teaching them in that space, it feels to them like something new to learn and somewhere else to invest time. So in the end, I'm not actually teaching them in their space, because any place with a teacher in it, or an app that's required for school is busywork. It's not worth the time, the spontaneity, the humor and creativity that they will invest in their other social networking apps.
*To be fair, you don't have to be young to embrace this new way of all these new applications. Even my millennial peers try to juggle messages, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and many more.
