Teenagers Communication or Lack Thereof

 By: Caitlin Jensen

            Communication is ever present in our lives. There is not a single instance where we are not communicating. It is impossible to not communicate. There is nonverbal communication and verbal communication. Nonverbal communication is also commonly called body language. There are many parts to body language, how you are positioned in regard to the people in the room. The way you hold your arms. How you are standing. How you are sitting. Your facial expressions. All of these make up a person’s body language in communicating.

            Because communication is such an important part of our lives because we do it constantly, it is important to understand how technology affects the communication of teenagers. We have seen a steady decrease of face-to-face communication amongst teenagers in the past few years. In fact of the seventy-five percent of teenagers who own a cellphone seventy-two percent of them text more than use any other form of communication.

            It is an addiction to teenagers. Parents have reported that their teenagers are tied to their cell phones¹. That they are texting nonstop. They text when they are opening the fridge door, immediately after getting out of the shower, and even texting their friend the second that they get home from visiting their friend. This is a sign of severe attachment to the cell phones³. Texting has overtaken every other form of communication for teenagers. Teens often say how much they hate even phone calls.

Teens don’t text complete words because it takes to much time or energy. They abbreviate words to as few characters as possible; you becomes U, are becomes R, just kidding becomes JK, laughing out loud is LOL, talk to you later is TTYL, HBU is how about you, LAMO is laugh my ass off, BTW is by the way, OFC is of course, NP is no problem, NGL is not going to lie, WTD is what to do, SMH is shake my head, and so on². There are a lot more that I can not list. Teenagers no longer feel the need to text in actual words as there now abbreviations for practically every phrase that they use. And with all of the abbreviations that isn’t enough teenagers are now use emojis as well as with all the acronyms. There is a whole language using the emojis that they have. They have even come up with a collection of emojis to mean even the titles of music and movies. Which I think is actually insane.

            All this technology makes teenagers brain dead zombies. They are addicted to their phones. This attachment to technology is an addiction that develops in early childhood. It is an addiction that teenagers have to fight for the rest of their lives. We have all heard about the groups of teenagers that get together and sit in the same room on their phones and don’t talk to each other but are on their phone texting as their form of communication. Many teenagers are afraid of communicating face-to-face with other people. And technology has enabled teenagers to be able to communicate completely without even being face-to-face with any person.

            There have always been people who are scared of communicating in person. But technology has enabled teenagers to be able to become dependent on technology to do all of their communicating for them. And with the advancements of technology, it is only getting easier. Teenagers are not able to develop the skill of reading body language, this is because they don’t use it or interact with anyone in person. The skill of being able to understand body language take practice to learn and teenagers don’t even use body language in their communication, so they never need to learn how to communicate with it.

            Teenagers also have lost the ability to understand changes in tone of voice. Teenagers don’t understand sarcasm anymore. Dry humor just goes over their head. They don’t use their voices anymore and it makes it hard to understand all the nuances of vocal communication. They have a hard time understanding how a slight change in tone changes the meaning of the sentence said. Because texting is the main form of communication there are misinterpretation of what is said. When you receive a text message you interpret how you believe the person was feeling while texting the message. This causes misinterpretation if you do not understand the person well or they do not give any hints as to how they are feeling. You can’t tell sarcasm through a text message. This is a problem when texting with teenagers. The misinterpretation of text messages can cause problems between teenagers themselves because we all, while reading anything, interpret the tone and meaning of a message subconsciously. Often this interpretation is influenced by their own emotions.

            Teenagers can not speak with grammar. In any sense of the phrase. They often speak like they text. Often as you are listening to a group of teenagers you hear them say TTYL as they are saying goodbye. They are no longer speaking out loud in proper diction. This is a problem. Teenagers are not learning how to be able to speak to adults. This skill is important to have as they are trying to get a job. But many teenagers are unable to speak well enough to be able to be good candidates for a job.

            Technology is a good thing as well. It allows teenagers to be connected with their friends and family long distance. Parents are able to contact their teenagers at practically anytime and anyplace. Technology allows teenagers to stay in contact with their friends and family when they move away, like to college. However, there are consequences for technology. Especially with the addictions that teenagers have to their phones. This addiction and the way that constantly being on the phone affects the communication of our teenagers in such a way that it does affect their future. It can have a serious impact on the majority of social interactions between teens. As parents watch how your teenagers communicate, see how they talk to their peers and to adults. Try to encourage your teens to practice communicating face to face with different people to improve their ability to communicate.

 

            References

1.Yardi, S., & Bruckman, A. (2011). Social and technical challenges in parenting teens' social media use. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979422

2. Grinter, R., & Eldridge, M. (2003). WAN2TLK? Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '03. https://doi.org/10.1145/642611.642688

3. Thomas, M., & Tripathi, P. (2019). Comparison of internet addiction between teenagers and young adults. Indian Journal of Health & Wellbeing, 10.