I know that I am not the only parent in this world who is concerned about tech and how it is affecting the next generation of future adults. Where I work there are break areas or staging areas where numerous employees hang out to eat, take breaks, or just sit waiting to be tasked out with work. Back when I was on shift before the huge tech boom, those rooms were filled with conversations all day and night long, every day of the year.
I walk into one of those rooms now and see 5 people sitting at tables that are literally a few feet away from one another. 3 of the people are looking down at their phones, one is working on a laptop, and one on a tablet. Not a word is being said and no interpersonal communication is occurring. These are grown adults, and it is even worse with teens in America today.
Look at Snapchat as an example. Each person on Snapchat has a number. That number is essentially how many Snaps they have sent and received within the system since they signed up. I did a bit of research on my friends list and looked at different people who have Snapchat but are from different generations.
My Snapchat number is 583, and another friend of mine who is the same age as me and who is very active on Snapchat has a number of 23,468, which I found high (at the time I started looking). Two more people my same age came in with numbers of 509 and 783.
Then I looked at two people who are 10 or more years older than I am (I am going on 42 this year). Their Snapchat numbers were 308 and 186.
Then comes the very interesting data. I looked up my 17 year old daughter's Snapchat number and it is 201,758, and one of her friends has a number of 359,814. Those numbers literally blew my mind. I am a data cruncher, so I wanted to put this all into the perspective of time, because the most important commodity we have in life is time, and I think we can all agree on that.
So, on average, a person spends approximately 10 seconds either sending or receiving a Snap. Using that as a base, if you take my total number of 583, multiply it by 10, you get 5,830 seconds. Take 5,830 seconds and divide it by 60, you get 97.17 minutes. That means that I have wasted just over an hour-and-a-half on Snapchat since I started using the service years ago. Not too bad.
Now I will do the same calculation with my daughter's number of 201,758. I take that times 10 and get 2,017,580 seconds. Take that divided by 60 and you get 33,626.33 minutes. Take that divided by 60 and you get 560.44 hours. Take that divided by 24 and you get 23.35 days. That means that my oldest daughter has essentially wasted 23 and a third days of her life sending and receiving Snaps on Snapchat. My daughter's friend with the larger number has wasted between 41 and 42 days of her life on Snapchat.
What makes the data even more interesting is the fact that I am only talking about one social media platform here. I am not including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Texting, or any other apps that take up your time. Just looking at this one data point opens your eyes to how much time the upcoming generation wastes on social media of some sort.
What does this really matter? It matters because we have a generation of children who get terrified looks on their faces when they get an actual phone call, because they aren't prepared for the interpersonal verbal communication that is required of people in life. Technology is slowly replacing interpersonal communication in the upcoming generation. There are things you cannot accomplish communicating electronically that you can accomplish speaking face to face or even over the phone. Electronically, you can easily misinterpret someone's mood, tone, emotion, or meaning behind what they are sending. Face-to-Face it is much easier to gauge all of those things.
It was painful for my daughter, but at about the age of 12 I started forcing her to order her own food at restaurants and I put her in situations where she had to verbally interact with the world. It was obviously uncomfortable for her at first. She got better at it, but she hated it. She still to this day would rather text back and forth with someone for an hour rather than talk to them over the phone for 1 minute to lock down plans.
Sometimes technology doesn't save you time either. Look at the Pizza Hut App for instance. When I order a pizza to be delivered to my home, I call Pizza Hut, tell them what I want, give them my credit card information, and get off the phone. All in it takes about 2 minutes of my time. Using the App, you have to go through the selection process by clicking on the toppings, whether or not you want extra toppings or standard, what type of crust, what sides, drinks, etc. By the time you work through the app process, you have wasted 5-10 minutes of time that could have been saved by simply making the phone call in the first place.
I have said it many times, but will say it again. Technological Advancement is both the greatest thing and worst thing that has happened to the world in recent years. I remember when I was a kid and one of the big things to do was write back and forth to pen pals around the world. I would always look forward to receiving the letters in the mail, and then taking the time to pull out a fresh piece of paper and hand write a response. That was very personal. We don't have anything like that anymore.
Taking pictures used to be a special thing. You went out and bought film, loaded it into your Kodak Camera, took pictures at special occasions, and then took the film in to Walgreens to be developed, walking home with 12-20 pictures from the event that you would put into a photo album to commemorate the occasion for future generations. Many people today don't even have photo albums. They upload pictures to Facebook from their phones, tablets and computers and in many cases that is as far as it goes. Interesting fact...Facebook isn't going to exist forever. Most people have a pile of mini-SD and regular SD cards laying around that are filled with pictures and videos, and computer hard drives that are also packed full of pictures. I have thousands of pictures electronically that I haven't printed out to put into photo albums, and I am deathly scared of losing them. My wife and I have talked many times about sorting through them all, categorizing them, printing the important ones, and creating albums...but it never happens, because, well, life happens.
Ok, I have taken this train off the rails in a couple different directions, so let me get back to my point. I feel that technology has become an obstacle put in front of the younger generations preventing them from learning the interpersonal skills that are not only needed in life, but healthy. To prove this someone should take a group of teenage friends, put them in a room together, and take away their devices. Leave them there for 6 hours and see what happens. That might be a good 20/20 Episode....lol
DUNK
I walk into one of those rooms now and see 5 people sitting at tables that are literally a few feet away from one another. 3 of the people are looking down at their phones, one is working on a laptop, and one on a tablet. Not a word is being said and no interpersonal communication is occurring. These are grown adults, and it is even worse with teens in America today.
Look at Snapchat as an example. Each person on Snapchat has a number. That number is essentially how many Snaps they have sent and received within the system since they signed up. I did a bit of research on my friends list and looked at different people who have Snapchat but are from different generations.
My Snapchat number is 583, and another friend of mine who is the same age as me and who is very active on Snapchat has a number of 23,468, which I found high (at the time I started looking). Two more people my same age came in with numbers of 509 and 783.
Then I looked at two people who are 10 or more years older than I am (I am going on 42 this year). Their Snapchat numbers were 308 and 186.
Then comes the very interesting data. I looked up my 17 year old daughter's Snapchat number and it is 201,758, and one of her friends has a number of 359,814. Those numbers literally blew my mind. I am a data cruncher, so I wanted to put this all into the perspective of time, because the most important commodity we have in life is time, and I think we can all agree on that.
So, on average, a person spends approximately 10 seconds either sending or receiving a Snap. Using that as a base, if you take my total number of 583, multiply it by 10, you get 5,830 seconds. Take 5,830 seconds and divide it by 60, you get 97.17 minutes. That means that I have wasted just over an hour-and-a-half on Snapchat since I started using the service years ago. Not too bad.
Now I will do the same calculation with my daughter's number of 201,758. I take that times 10 and get 2,017,580 seconds. Take that divided by 60 and you get 33,626.33 minutes. Take that divided by 60 and you get 560.44 hours. Take that divided by 24 and you get 23.35 days. That means that my oldest daughter has essentially wasted 23 and a third days of her life sending and receiving Snaps on Snapchat. My daughter's friend with the larger number has wasted between 41 and 42 days of her life on Snapchat.
What makes the data even more interesting is the fact that I am only talking about one social media platform here. I am not including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Texting, or any other apps that take up your time. Just looking at this one data point opens your eyes to how much time the upcoming generation wastes on social media of some sort.
What does this really matter? It matters because we have a generation of children who get terrified looks on their faces when they get an actual phone call, because they aren't prepared for the interpersonal verbal communication that is required of people in life. Technology is slowly replacing interpersonal communication in the upcoming generation. There are things you cannot accomplish communicating electronically that you can accomplish speaking face to face or even over the phone. Electronically, you can easily misinterpret someone's mood, tone, emotion, or meaning behind what they are sending. Face-to-Face it is much easier to gauge all of those things.
It was painful for my daughter, but at about the age of 12 I started forcing her to order her own food at restaurants and I put her in situations where she had to verbally interact with the world. It was obviously uncomfortable for her at first. She got better at it, but she hated it. She still to this day would rather text back and forth with someone for an hour rather than talk to them over the phone for 1 minute to lock down plans.
Sometimes technology doesn't save you time either. Look at the Pizza Hut App for instance. When I order a pizza to be delivered to my home, I call Pizza Hut, tell them what I want, give them my credit card information, and get off the phone. All in it takes about 2 minutes of my time. Using the App, you have to go through the selection process by clicking on the toppings, whether or not you want extra toppings or standard, what type of crust, what sides, drinks, etc. By the time you work through the app process, you have wasted 5-10 minutes of time that could have been saved by simply making the phone call in the first place.
I have said it many times, but will say it again. Technological Advancement is both the greatest thing and worst thing that has happened to the world in recent years. I remember when I was a kid and one of the big things to do was write back and forth to pen pals around the world. I would always look forward to receiving the letters in the mail, and then taking the time to pull out a fresh piece of paper and hand write a response. That was very personal. We don't have anything like that anymore.
Taking pictures used to be a special thing. You went out and bought film, loaded it into your Kodak Camera, took pictures at special occasions, and then took the film in to Walgreens to be developed, walking home with 12-20 pictures from the event that you would put into a photo album to commemorate the occasion for future generations. Many people today don't even have photo albums. They upload pictures to Facebook from their phones, tablets and computers and in many cases that is as far as it goes. Interesting fact...Facebook isn't going to exist forever. Most people have a pile of mini-SD and regular SD cards laying around that are filled with pictures and videos, and computer hard drives that are also packed full of pictures. I have thousands of pictures electronically that I haven't printed out to put into photo albums, and I am deathly scared of losing them. My wife and I have talked many times about sorting through them all, categorizing them, printing the important ones, and creating albums...but it never happens, because, well, life happens.
Ok, I have taken this train off the rails in a couple different directions, so let me get back to my point. I feel that technology has become an obstacle put in front of the younger generations preventing them from learning the interpersonal skills that are not only needed in life, but healthy. To prove this someone should take a group of teenage friends, put them in a room together, and take away their devices. Leave them there for 6 hours and see what happens. That might be a good 20/20 Episode....lol
DUNK
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