Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 294 posts

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#21

Post by cortesoft »

bencollier49 wrote: post #8
lskopwol wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? I feel like peak instant messenger time was around 2001 or so... I wonder if it has to do with how old we are?

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#22

Post by jfaat »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #12
jacobush wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB+iPhone?

> iPhone I doubt it. How many high school seniors would have owned one soon after its release? Too much of an early-adopter luxury item. I'd be curious to know when smartphones actually started became ubiquitous among older teenagers.

I graduated HS in 2007. I think I had 2 friends with iPhones, in an affluent town in Connecticut. My first smartphone was an iPhone 4 in 2010. It was still probably another year before smartphones were ubiquitous amongst my friend group.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#23

Post by crooked-v »

bobthepanda wrote: post #15

There's also the fact that when you're in the suburbs, you need a chauffeur until you can drive. American adults are working more and more, and thus less available to take children to outside activities, which these days are also further and further apart.

And even when those kids in the burbs want to walk places, their parents risk being arrested for it [1].

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-s...

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#24

Post by vonseel »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #9
Vagantem wrote: post #2

Interesting 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.

That’s still a year before any of us really felt the Great Recession. I was in my first year of college back then..

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#25

Post by skywhopper »

Zak wrote: post #14

Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be. As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and gradu…

Yes, more and more super-suburban living, combined with increasingly restrictive teen driving regulations, curfews, and fear-based media stories about abductions have ratcheted down the ability of teens to hang out together. So when technology came along to enable improved interpersonal contact, it was embraced far more rapidly than it would have been if teen freedom were as high as it was in the 70s.

The graphs they show don't perfectly correlate to the trends in hanging out in person. While smartphones have definitely contributed to changes in the culture (for everyone, not just teens), it's false to pretend that they are entirely responsible for changes in loneliness. It just as well may correlate to being bombarded by reactionary hatred from adults over things teens have grown up thinking about more openly, like more open ideas about gender and sexuality. Or perhaps from finding themselves in a culture of fear about mass shootings while again faced with an adult political establishment who does nothing about it. Or maybe just facing the reality that the grown-ups are making things worse, day by day, and that they're going to have to clean this all up after us.

Smartphones have nothing to do with that.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#26

Post by threatofrain »

Zak wrote: post #14

Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be. As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and gradu…

There also ought be more public spaces in general. When everything is all zoned up to be residential or commercial, there's nowhere to go without a credit card.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#27

Post by vonseel »

mises wrote: post #19
_lflx wrote: post #13

tl;dr: technology in the late 90s and mid 00s gave power to users to be more social on their own terms, technology in the late 00s took power away from users and gave it to platforms to dictate social interaction with notifications It appears that this dip in loneliness started as early as the late 90s when internet and cell phone technology was connecting us and enabling us to be more, deliberately, social. Perhaps…

> Notifications are making people miserable So stay off social media. I do.

Or disable notifications! My phone has been on silent since 2012, and badge alerts are disabled for nearly everything. I find that I check it enough to see a text if someone needs to reach me.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#28

Post by e40 »

Zak wrote: post #14

Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be. As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and gradu…

I can tell you that as a parent of an 18 yr old, I've always encouraged him to go out and be with his friends. Since he was 12, he's much preferred to meet online in games. Whole groups of them. Whooping and hollering until the wee hours of the morning, when they can.

But, I generally agree with your statement.

Oh, I have a son, some it might be vastly different for daughters.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#29

Post by x2f10 »

hannasanarion wrote: post #3

All 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…

>I am not convinced that face-to-face interaction is an inherent good.

I think the inherent good is that young people understand social dynamics and how to read the non-verbal cues of others. I've noticed some, those who spend a excessive amount of time online, have a hard time translating their personality into IRL.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#30

Post by the_jeremy »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #9
Vagantem wrote: post #2

Interesting 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.

I doubt that the start of the recession impacted teens this much. I think it's more likely the rise/fall of certain social media (yahoo/AIM/FB/idk) than relating to them missing physiological needs, especially given most teens are not fending for themselves.
Post reply on HN