U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
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U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
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Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#2Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#3All the sillhouettes of kids in the banner have undercuts and it makes me shivver. Hate that style. I guess I'm an old man now.
Anyway, I'm hardly surprised that kids aren't spending time with friends in person, because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default. In my childhood in the 90s, I did it only for events that require it, like board games or sports, or when the alternatives are boring or unavailable, like when I haven't had a new game to play in a while, or my sister was hogging the internet.
The separation has only increased as at-home activities have gotten less boring and more available, and as physical presence became less neccessary for social activities like games.
AIM was great, we could chat without having to be physically together.
Battle.net was great, we could play games without having to be physically together.
Xbox Live was great, we could play games AND chat at the same time without having to be physically together. (many fond memories of high school nights quizzing each other on history while blowing each other up in Halo 3)
Facebook was great, we could share stories and media without having to be physically together, and asynchronously as a bonus.
I am not convinced that face-to-face interaction is an inherent good. The last several decades of technological development have been the story of people striving to spend less time with each other physically. Especially given the article's proposed explanation that "friend groups meet on instragram now, and kids without instagram are lonely", the barriers to telecommunication are lower than ever before.
Or maybe we should cut this thread short and save the discussion for Linuxfest Northwest.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#4Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
Hmm... Facebook was opened to the public near the end of 2006. No idea if there's a correlation or if it's even possible to find one.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#5Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
Probably advent of instant messengers made them feel less lonely, culminating around 2006-2008 when modern social networks really took off, but peaking in today's result of every post on fb/twitch/instagram engendering social anxiety and thus 'loneliness'.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#6Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
FB+iPhone?
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#7All the sillhouettes of kids in the banner have undercuts and it makes me shivver. Hate that style. I guess I'm an old man now. Anyway, I'm hardly surprised that kids aren't spending time with friends in person, because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default. In my childhood in the 90s, I did it only for events that require it, like board games or sports, or when the alternatives are boring or un…
> "because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default."
That's very far from true.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#8Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
Probably advent of instant messengers made them feel less lonely, culminating around 2006-2008 when modern social networks really took off, but peaking in today's result of every post on fb/twitch/instagram engendering social anxiety and thus 'loneliness'.
I reckon you're right. This was peak Yahoo Instant Messenger time, and it launched in 1998, just before the graph starts moving downwards.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#9Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
You can download the data for the chart. It's actually 2007 if you don't eyeball it. I think we're probably seeing Maslow's hierarchy of needs here. The great recession made loneliness less important to them or less apparent to them. Pretty cool actually. This kind of thing is probably unaccounted for in many similar studies.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#10Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
Probably advent of instant messengers made them feel less lonely, culminating around 2006-2008 when modern social networks really took off, but peaking in today's result of every post on fb/twitch/instagram engendering social anxiety and thus 'loneliness'.
True - I can still hear that MSN "new message" sound echoing in my head..