Teens Would Rather Text Their Friends Than Talk To Them In Person, Poll Shows (nypost.com) 142
A new poll of 1,141 teenagers shows that teenagers prefer to text their friends than talk in person. The findings come from Common Sense Media's 2018 Social Media, Social Life survey. Fortune reports: Only 15% of teens said Facebook was their main social media site, down from 68% in 2012. Snapchat is now the main site for 41% of teenagers, followed by Instagram at 22%. In addition, this year's survey saw texting (35%) surpass in-person (32%) as teens' favorite way to communicate with friends. In 2012, 49% preferred to communicate in person, versus 33% who preferred texting.
[M]ore teens said that social media had a positive effect on their levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety than those who said it had a negative one, but it seems to have the opposite effect on teens who score low on the authors' social-emotional well-being scale. Of those, 70% said they sometimes feel left out when using social media, 43% feel bad if no one likes or comments on their posts, and 35% said they had been cyberbullied. They were also more likely to say that social media was "extremely" or "every" important, compared to their peers who score high on the scale.
[M]ore teens said that social media had a positive effect on their levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety than those who said it had a negative one, but it seems to have the opposite effect on teens who score low on the authors' social-emotional well-being scale. Of those, 70% said they sometimes feel left out when using social media, 43% feel bad if no one likes or comments on their posts, and 35% said they had been cyberbullied. They were also more likely to say that social media was "extremely" or "every" important, compared to their peers who score high on the scale.
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Thanks parents (Score:1)
Thanks parents for (lack of) raising such a shitty generation.
Re:Thanks parents (Score:5, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with parents. It has everything to do with how society evolves.
Keep your kid away from socializing online and they will become outcasts and misfits. You'd be proud as a parent and your kid would be fucked up.
Forbidding is easier than mentoring and guiding, of course.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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So, the average slashdotter. :)
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So... famine, lack of potable water and crushing poverty in vast regions of the globe fall under rank #3 and below?
On topic: I don't say I like where Social media is going, but it's a wave you can't stop, however you can ride it, together with your kids, minimizing its ill effects.
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This and obesity are the two most serious problems facing our citizenry, in my opinion.
So... famine, lack of potable water and crushing poverty in vast regions of the globe fall under rank #3 and below?
My guess is that jpaine619 lives in the US, so "problems facing our citenzry" likely means "problems facing US citizens." I agree that lack of potable water and crushing poverty are not the most serious problems within the US. Not because other problems are of greater magnitude to those harmed by them, but because their are relatively few people who have those problems in the US.
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Says the self-satisfied person posting this on social media. Yes, you. Upping your character count does not increase your level of virtue.
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No, you're an adult. Posting from your computer every day, usually multiple times per day. Insubstantial differences.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
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Re:Thanks parents (Score:4, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with how society evolves. This isn't socialization, this is turning kids into hermits. Studies have shown that smart phones and social media are addictive. The instant gratification of both boosts dopamine levels.. Pretty soon you get used to those elevated dopamine levels.. That's addiction.
Or maybe this represents a solution to a problem, which is that face to face meetings, particularly with children, but also adults have some problems. Amongst them:
1) Difficulty arranging transportation
2) Difficulty agreeing on venue (particularly when parents refuse certain venues
3) Inefficient use of time when in face to face scenario. I don't know about you, but when I meet with friends I already want it to be over before I walk in, I've got shit to do.
4) Text communication provides all the actual value of interacting with another human, without messy realities and alpha-pack issues. Online anyone can be alpha, even if in a wheelchair, on a ventillator.
5) Conversations are slow and painful, you can do other things while they go on, most don't really require tremendous intellect. But it's rude.
6) You can respond when it is good for you, rather than immediately
I'm sure I've missed a bunch. While I'm not clear on the dopamine correlation, I'm also not sure that's relevant. If your body is rewarding you for efficiency or satisfying some internal pressure (that may have been artificial to begin with, built in by parents/teachers because THEY thought it was important), that doesn't seem like a problem. Addiction is a problem when it interferes with your obligations or is putting your physical health in significant immediate threat. That's not happening here. If meeting someone face to face is required to keep your job, for example, and you don't do it, then you have a problem. But if it's so you calk talk to Susie about who Sally blew last night...fuck that shit, use text.
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Things have changed (Score:2)
> I don't recall the exact numbers, but something like
> only 12% of High School Seniors have been on a date.
Society has changed and viruses have evolved. Showing my age here. Back in the mid-1960's 12 and 13 year olds were going on dates and screwing. No problem. Today if a pair of 15-year-olds get caught having consensual sex in a jurisdiction where age-of-consent is 16, they *BOTH* end up on the sex-offender-registry for life. And back in the 60's, condoms were made fun of. If you caught something,
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The dopamine is a very important factor. It's what creates the addiction. Your body doesn't always reward you for things that turn out to be positive in the long run. Eating a crapload of candy every day is a good example I think. Our bodies crave sugar & fats because they used to be very hard to get and are a good source of short term / long term energy. But, we have unlimited access to both today. Our mental reward for chomping down on a Snickers bar is causing some people a lot of problem.
This is n
Re:Thanks parents (Score:5, Interesting)
I have two teens and yes, they absolutely spend a lot of time interacting with their friends on social media. Just as previous generations might have spent hours on the phone in the evening. But they also love doing stuff with their friends. I've spent a lot of time shuffling my kids to/from other kids' houses and other places they meet people. They'll use their bikes too if where they're going is close enough. They go to and we've hosted many a sleepover.
Even when it comes to gaming, which they can easily do from their individual homes, my son often prefers to pack up his laptop, console, Switch or whatever and go to somebody's house with 2 or 3 other guys and spend the night.
As far as whether they prefer texting to an in person conversation, I think a lot depends on the person, the nature of the conversation, and the context.
An interesting question to ask would be which choice would they make:
A: You could never leave your house and you could never have friends over, but you could use social media to your hearts content
B: You could never use social media again short of getting and sending invites, but you're free to interact with people in person
There is no doubt that both would be crippling to a modern teen's social life, but I bet most would choose to interact exclusively in person vs never being able to interact in person.
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Really my point though was that having 35% of teens saying that texting is their favorite way to communicate with friends vs 32% of teens saying that talking in person is their favorite way doesn't tell the whole story. 33% of teens preferred some other means altogether. If you were to ask about close friends vs any friend or communicating with individual
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Are Weather Kids even human, and is accommodating them worth the mess? You really want to see what lightning+water does to a computer network?
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"Keep your kid away from socializing online and they will become outcasts and misfits. You'd be proud as a parent and your kid would be fucked up."
Is that what Mark and Evan told you?
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Who and who?
I personally am a forum person. I despise Facebook, Twitter and the like. But I am smart enough to realize my holy crusade would be quite don-quixotesque.
Instead, I am teaching my kids to use those platforms wisely, understand the dangers, avoid the traps. Will I be successful? I hope. For now, they are too small to understand, instead choosing to trust me with what I am telling them.
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my holy crusade would be quite don-quixotesque.
quixotic [merriam-webster.com]
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Newsflash, that isn't how words work.
When somebody coins a specialized word, regular words that describe the same thing, still also mean the same thing. They do not call for correction.
Don't be a lame false-pedant.
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I assumed that somebody that would say "don-quixotesque" was unaware of the word "quixotic." If somebody said, "this flower is very fragrance-having," I might suggest "fragrant." I'm not sure I understand your objection.
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I assumed
There is your mistake right there; you assumed, but then went on to offer purported corrections based on that, which is both lame and stupid.
Worse, you don't seem to comprehend the difference between matters of literary style, and the correct choice of words. Literary style that is merely different than what you assume you would have written is not any sort of mistake; it is not, for example, a stylistic mistake. Just a different writing style.
Calling out a writing style as if it is mistaken just shows your
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No, it's fine, I actually appreciate being taught new words. So all's cool.
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FWIW you are the first :)
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Thank you. :)
Didn't know that word existed. With English passing 1,000,000 words recently, combined with me not being a native English Speaker, I hope I'd be pardoned for not being aware of its existence. But now I know
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Trying to be helpful. It's not a very common word, but it's a good fit for what I inferred from your term and has the same origin. Some other guy gave me hell for mentioning it.
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I understand both points of view, but I'm leaning towards your side :P
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The risk of 1-word posts is that they might be read in a different tone-of-voice than they were written.
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The word "quixotic" is also a reference to the fictional character Don Quixote who "tilted at wind mills" a reference to a useless crusade.
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That was his point. war4peace said "don-quixotesque", and gnick was pointing out that there's already a word for that: quixotic. Though it bothers me that apparently it's pronounced quicks-aw-tic and not kee-hoh-tic.
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If you're not going to raise a kid according to your own values, then what's the point?
Fuck society's expectations - especially the expectations of the whiny peers your child will be competing against for jobs and resources in the future.
Re:Thanks parents (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're a dumbass, you'll try and fail to raise your kid according to your own values. If you're at all intelligent, you'll raise your kid to understand your values, but also understanding that your values were formed during your formative years a quarter to a half century ago, and that your kid will never have those same values because the world has changed, and they won't be growing up in the environment you grew up in.
My kid won't grow up valuing manual labor, because there won't be that much for him to do. My kid won't value freedom at the expense of pain from growing up with a whole lot of scar tissue from trying to jump a sled over a barbed wire fence, from falling down a cliff while climbing in the woods at the age of 12, from a 40mph bike wipe-out on a highway hill, etc. He's not going to be able to survive in the wild for a couple of weeks if he has to. He's just not going to grow up in that world.
Sure, I could relocate and try to recreate all that shit, but the world has changed so much that it won't matter.
My kid is going to grow up in a world where pot is legal, and he can smoke it on his 18th birthday. My kid is going to grow up in a world where you can vape discretely at school, but where cigarettes are too expensive to buy. My kid is going to grow up in a world which has pervasive surveillance, but mercifully has at least invented private browsing sessions. My kid is going to grow up in a world where if he can get a visa gift card, he can make an email account and an amazon account and order anything in the world he wants, and potentially get home before me and hide it in his room.
This world is so vastly different now that there is no hope in instilling my values onto my kid. The best I can do is let him know what they are and where I got them, and try to help him create his own value system, based on the reality of the world currently.
And if you think "fuck society's expectations" is going to help your kid, you are dead wrong. Unless your kid wants to be a hermit, then that's the right path.
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If you're not going to raise a kid according to your own values, then what's the point?
The point is to raise your kids according to current society, not the one you were raised in.
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Keep your kid away from socializing online and they will become outcasts and misfits.
Yeah, but it isn't like anyone talks to the people who aren't outcasts and misfits anyways. They just get texts.
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That is to say, we can be upset about how smartphones are changing culture and the damage it does to relationships, but that doesn't mean we have to select abstinence for ourselves or our children.
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...which was exactly my point.
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Outcasts and misfits? What the hell are you smoking?
You're insane if you let your kids on social media. All they do is harass and bully one another via such mediums. Keep them off social media and you reduce their target surface.
And if you don't let them out of the house, you reduce their target surface for a number of physical crimes which they could be victim of. Some bubble wrap could also do wonders to prevent injuries within the home as well. Letting your kids experience such a dangerous world would be insane.
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In fact, teens today are less vulnerable to crime and car crashes because they're staying inside (and IIRC to STDs and pregnancy because they're having sex less). But they're more vulnerable to obesity and depression.
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I would be insane to let them access social media while unsupervised.
Social media is and will be part of their lives. They need to learn its dangers and advantages, and I am there to help them figure those out.
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Just like TV with the previous generation.
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You know this is Slashdot right? A place considered a haven for the stereotype guy living in his parents basement never going out and only communicating via computers.
This stereotype is for the late baby boomers and gen X.
Then we also had couch potatoes for kids who just sat there and watched TV all day.
Preteen and teen years are just brutal. Most of your friends are just kids who have their own problems but are tolerating your presence with them. That is why when we grow up many of our high school friend
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"Preteen and teen years are just brutal."
Speak for yourself mate. We didn't all have mental health problems when we were that age or were so weak and inadequate that peer pressure dictated how we behaved and what we did. I had quite a good time when I was a teen FWIW.
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In my experience, the people who loudly proclaim how awesome of a time they had in their teens are usually part of the reason why other kids were so miserable.
Middle school pretty much decided for me that I never wanted to have children, because kids at that age are fucking assholes -
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Found (one of the many) neckbeard(s).
I bet attractive women suck too because they won't see what a nice guy you are.
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You really need to get over yourself, you sound like the typical whiny self pitying prick that every school has a few of, blaming everyone except themselves for their problems, jealous of anyone who seemed to be enjoying their life and still bitter years later nursing their grudges like an old whisky and still defined by them.
FWIW no, I didn't bully anyone, I just got on with things. Perhaps I just went to a school with normal people since I didn't meet many sociopaths there.
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"then you must be the exception or perhaps you have/had wealthy parents or something"
No and no, just normal.
"Isolated, exiled, social problems, problems at home plus the regular problems of the preteen and teen ages... yep... it was bad"
Sucked to be you eh? But not everyone had your shitty life.
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Isolated, exiled, social problems
Well, which was it? The worst sorts of social problems lead to viewing isolation as a goal, exile as victory!
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Thanks parents for (lack of) raising such a shitty generation.
The next generation doesn't do things like I did them. The world is coming to an end. They must be bad people- only my way of doing things is correct.
There is nothing wrong if kids want to text rather than speak. If that's their preference, so be it.
I blame the parents and the adults! (Score:1)
Teens do what they see parents (or any other adult) are doing.
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You haven't been around teens much, I guess? If anything, teens do the exact opposite of what their parents are doing or considering right.
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Because you're a teenager and don't want your friends to take pictures of your surprised/sad/whatever face and make a meme out of it.
Re: I blame the parents and the adults! (Score:2)
I have three teens.
They do accordingly to my examples.
Despite they're good or bad.
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Yes, my dad thought so, too...
Re: Brain error (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the article can be summarized as "texting in prison is every important".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Kids these days have it right. txting is far more efficient.... Unless you're my mother... Or one of those people who types "Please tell me what the current population of New York is." as a Google search.
Anybody ever hear of E.M. Forster (Score:5, Interesting)
and his short story "The Machine Stops"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's was exactly what popped into my head too.
Imagine if the Internet stopped.
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Im reminded of that story often the way the world is heading.
Old fashioned style (Score:2)
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Instance of Self Centered extremes (Score:2)
We all are WAITING for other people to shut up so we can say what WE want to say. We talk at everybody wanting them to listen to us (and maybe settling for them just hearing us) but we try to hide our impatience while we wait for the next chance to talk some more. THINK about it. How often are you waiting for them to finish talking or jumping to summations of what they are expressing getting board having to wait for the next paragraph to come... or thinking about what you are going to say next as they tri
Every important? (Score:1)
They were also more likely to say that social media was "extremely" or "every" important, compared to their peers who score high on the scale.
Are these teens who speak English as a second language by any chance?
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No, just BeauHD.
text is often more efficient (Score:1)
I'd rather read a text description of a news event or a tutorial than slog through a Youtube video of some dolt slowly describing it. Likewise a text message is often the more efficient way to send a brief tidbit of data without wasting time on rituals of politeness or getting sidetracked into "hey did you see that show about X" baloney which happens in spoken "communication"
Life finds a way (Score:4, Funny)
When I was a teen, it was mostly IRC, then came the various YM/AIM and ICQ (in my country at least, those were a later addition).
At least now you don't have to worry about net splits or messing up someone's ICQ number.
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Yourkshire accent:
That’s nothin, when I were a lad we used to have to catch pigeons, and teach them to fly home. Then we had to do the tiniest writing on the message.
You tell the young people of today that, and they dooont believe ya.
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No kidding ... (Score:1)
I can't tell you how often I've seen two teens sitting on a bench texting and wondered "are they here together, and are they texting each other?"
Though, I have to admit, some of the more pathetic examples of this are seeing a family of four who have gone out for dinner ... and then all four of them have their faces buried in their phones.
The extent to which smart phones have made people into zombies is frightening sometimes.
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Is that really what it shows? (Score:3)
Have you talked to their friends? (Score:2)
Have you talked to their friends?
Yeah - I'd rather send them a text message than talk to them too......especially since I have text messaging on my phone completely blocked.
And the survey says... (Score:2)
Well, I really don't know what the survey says, because none of the links provided in TFS leads to a copy of the actual survey. Without being able to look at the survey, it's impossible to evaluate the claims made in the overly-slick and somewhat glib 'executive summary'. That summary, in the absence of the actual questionnaire on which its conclusions are ostensibly based, is utterly meaningless and not at all newsworthy. Nothing to see here, move along please...
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Pretty much like most of slashdot's summaries then.
FWIW, my kid is 17, he says snapchat is the big thing at school, but he also goes over and hangs out with his friends almost every other night, so from what I see, it's not so much an either/or thing but a supplemental thing. Texting and social media are certainly easier and more rapid ways to communicate then having to travel across town to talk to someone in person.
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You got what you deserved for clicking! Don't read that stuff.
I know a lot of ham radio operators that prefer CW (Score:2)
Victorian English (Score:2)
In other words we are all becoming Victorian English. We would rather write a strongly worded letter than confront in person or send a Thank You note instead of thanking in person.
Thank god for texting as it is leading to a revival of written communication which had been dying with the onslaught of overly gregarious extrovert types who got out of control with the invention of the phone and the automobile.
Texting is Multi-Threaded (Score:3)
This took a poll? (Score:2)
I have 4 young 20-somethings.
2 are Eagle Scouts, and getting them to actually go IN PERSON to visit local businesses and present their projects to ask for funding was far more anxiety producing and work than the whole planning and project execution.
2 are daughters, and even when they're having drama issues or trouble getting things planned, if we suggest "well, why don't you just CALL them and get it sorted much faster than text/IG/whatever method they're using?" is met with incredulous stares.
Efficiency (Score:2)
Isolation is a self-reinforcing downward spiral (Score:2)
Blah, Typing on A Phone Keyboard (Score:2)
Teens? No thanks (Score:2)
Me too... (Score:2)
... with any text communications due to my speech and hearing impediments. I wished I was a teen again like I did with dial-ups! :P
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The only reason I would do texting is when I want the conversation recorded in some form (and it is voluntary by the other). Recording voice on the phone would require more steps to do so (including permission). Text or email is what I want in order to prove what has been said later on.
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Nobody wants to talk with you over the phone.
Adapt.