Jeffery Zaslow of The Wall Street Journal opens his article with the story of a 17-year-old boy sent to the vice principal’s office after being caught sending text messages in class. The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy to pay attention to the teacher, not to his cellphone. Even as the boy nodded politely, Gallagher noticed something amiss — the boy was texting about his discipline for being caught texting.
“It was a subconscious act,” said Gallagher. “Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It’s compulsive.”
Zaslow calls the lifestyle of these young people “hypersocializing.” As he observes:
Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can “hyper-socializing” students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?
There is an argument to be noticed here. Some assert that this generation of teens and twenty-somethings has developed an invaluable ability to multitask, to frame arguments with few words, and to stay constantly connected. Some, like Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies, go so far as to argue that these young people are so skilled at “multimedia socializing” that their social skills are superior to previous generations, rightly understood.
Others, noting the time spent obsessively checking digital devices, see a loss of community, a fog of constant chatter, and, for both employers and educators, a massive volume of lost time. As P. M. Forni at Johns Hopkins University observes, “There is a lot of communication going on that is futile and trivial.”
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