[Insert New Techonology Here] Is Destroying [Insert Generation Younger Than Your Own]
"We live in a culture where young people-outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another-are ever less likely to develop the 'silent fluency' that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to 'read' the behavior of others, they are all thumbs."
I have mixed feelings about this Wall Street Journal op-ed. I mean, is it even true? Are we really living in a world where those damned kids never interact socially with others? It seems unlikely! And if we actually accept that premise, doesn't it follow that eventually they won't need to develop 'silent fluency' because at some point all the old people will be dead an no one will have it? On the other hand, screw the kids today, with their slouching and their emo music and all the sexting. And it is fair to acknowledge that constantly playing around with your BlackBerry can have disastrous consequences. I'm conflicted! I'm gonna IM some friends and see what they think.
Teenagers, historically, have NEVER been awkward. They've always been social experts until around 8 years ago.
Fluency in sexting is important.
Every generation has ALWAYS thought that the generation just one down from them is an awful, soulless rabble who will outdo their life work, literally going back to ancient Greece. This is because young people are in fact awful, and get less awful as they age, and then forget how awful they used to be when they were young.
What jfruh said. There's a sort of reverse-Oedipal thing where 'kids today' are always going to hell in a handbasket, and maybe it's the jealousy of their youth, or maybe it's misplaced proto-parental neurotic worrying.
But then it turns out it's all 'same shit, different day'. There really is nothing new under the sun, ever. They become us–albeit with different stuff in the WalMarts–and we become The Olds, and the world, she keeps right on turning.
Most of us kids do have horrible social skills, but I'm not sure how much this has to do with IMing.
In my experience, there's no correlation between how much time a person spends texting/messaging and how good they are at carrying on a conversation in person. I guess there are just enough kids who text a lot AND can't talk face-to-face that it's become a sort of stereotype.