Technologies such as cell phones and new social networking websites through the Internet have completely restructured the way people communicate and socialize in the last decade alone. One of the most interesting and perhaps important questions brought up in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution is, “How will mobile communications affect family and societal life?” (introduction).
In the New York Times Hilary Stout wrote an article entitled “Antisocial Networking?” which analyzed and deciphered the standard pre-teen conversation between a boy and girl via Facebook, which is very similar to text messaging between mobile devices. More specifically what she studied was not the conversation itself, but in fact how the words were typed, certain acronyms they used, and also how they expressed emotions with “emoticons” such as colons combined with a parenthesis to make a smiley face. Instead of actually conversing in person or even over a telephone, kids and teens have resorted to the quick and easy instant message or text message disregarding everything they learned in English class. With that said, the quick and easy messaging systems do have their drawbacks due to kids and teens also use these technologies for cyber-bullying (a seriously growing issue) and also texting sexually (sexting). Although these are issues that both need to be addressed more often, psychologists like Jeffrey G. Parker of the University of Alabama who is very concerned about how “…technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship” (Parker, 2). Parker has been studying this problem but states it is still too early to know the answer. His main goal is to decode whether these new ways of conversing with technology is either beneficial in that it allows children to be either more connected to their friends or diminished without physical interactions. So far, the signs are telling us that kids are not really developing true friendships compared to what older generations had growing up. Many, including myself find this fact to be problematic as far as necessary socialization goes for children during their childhood. For the article, follow the link below:
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