wasn't the whole point of communication networks reducing transportation costs?
U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
31–40 of 294 posts
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was graduating high school around then. It definitely did impact teens that much. Net job growth was negative by 300K+ for over a year. More than 800K jobs were lost in November 2008 alone. Lots of stress at home, and you're more than old enough to notice. So you start reading the news, where you find lots of people were speculating about if not a great depression at least a lost generation.
Graduating into GFC was terrifying.
I'm sure some were sheltered from it or blissfully unaware, but many were very aware.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#33Part 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.
This is becoming more of a problem, at least in the city I live. Greenspaces and public parks are being replaced with condos and apartment complexes with their own walled off private courtyards and such. Parks, little groves of trees and stuff are the kinds of places we'd hang out as teenagers a lot.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#34Part 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…
> that they are entirely responsible for changes in loneliness.
loneliness? The amount and richness of communication like the number of participants, number of parallel communications, number of the topics and the range of opinions, etc. is most probably much higher when using smartphones then when it is subject to the limitations of physical presence. Our species brain development is basically history of social communication, and the smartphones transcending those limits of physical presence is the next step for the brain development of our species. Granted the adjustment period may have its quirks, like absence of non-verbal parts of communication - face emotions, gestures, etc. - that our brain evolved to expect and not receives anymore and thus doesn't get the associated dopamine - may feel like loneliness.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#35tl;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 because its turned social into a fucking chore. It always was a chore, though, at least for anyone at all introverted. Even in the days before cellphones, I would sigh a sigh of relief when I could put down the phone. It was the same sigh when I closed the door after a visit from a salesperson or a service person. It's the same sigh of relief when I get home from a function a…
I don't know - I kinda see it like the show stranger things. That's how I grew up. We'd bike, walk, or whatever show up to our friends house. Parents didn't have instant communication back then, so the expectancy factor wasn't there. All that mattered was that when the sun was dimming, we'd have to be home for dinner.. Any time after school and before the dimming was our time. Like the goonies.
Damn. Damn no really damn, the current generation doesn't fucking have the goonies. That's just so sad.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#36Part 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.
I think encouragement and all-else-being-equal preference for in-person vs. online is pretty much a non-factor, short of extreme cases.
As mentioned above, there's just no comparison any more. I grew up in the city and had very, very few restrictions[1] on where/when I was out from around age 15, and we still preferred online. Going out in person is expensive, not everyone had equal transit access (and no one had a consistently available car), etc.
Yes, there were people who didn't join up online, who I would've loved to see more of. Meeting up with them more often would have been great, but doing it regularly just wasn't feasible - we'd see everyone at school and maybe after for 15-30 minutes while people cleared out, but that was the only regular thing.
[1] Mostly of the 'tell us where and when' variety - if my parents knew roughly how to find me if needed, that was good enough.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#37I volunteer at STEM after school program at a Northern California suburban public school in a very affluent county. Engineers from the local companies work on projects with hacker kids.
It's a pretty dreamy albeit "canned" town, I never lived in a place that nice. Lots of cul de sacs and "mini malls" and "canned fun" places that are very walkable (unlike the poorer suburbs where kids have to cross 8 lanes of traffic to meet at a Shari's).
I noticed that before I show up at 5PM (I get to leave work early two fridays a month, yay!, the kids are sitting around on their phones. And when I leave at 7pm, kids just go home with their parents. First: few of them drive. WTF?! Then the weird part: there's a frigging movieplex down the street with a bunch of restaurants and TWO parks on opposite sides of the main E/W street... and they just ... go home. WTF.
Maybe they are lying to the adults in the room, but the parents claim they go home and text or play computer games all night.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was graduating high school around then. It definitely did impact teens that much. Net job growth was negative by 300K+ for over a year. More than 800K jobs were lost in November 2008 alone. Lots of stress at home, and you're more than old enough to notice. So you start reading the news, where you find lots of people were speculating about if not a great depression at least a lost generation. Graduating into GFC was…
> So you start reading the news
not most teens.
Even with 1 year of economic stress, that's not going to suddenly make kids take a mature emotional perspective and feel less lonely.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Peak for you was likely when you were a teen.
But overall? In 2001 computers weren't ubiquitous nor portable. Middle-class kids were on IM on their desktops and maybe laptops for max a few hours per day.
Now kids have phones for IM all day and night.
Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person
#40Earlier 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.
Dumbphone texting was ubiquitious, though.