High-tech kids lost in face-to-face relationships

Social networks and cell phones... you and I may find these technologies sacrosanct, but for kids getting weaned on this stuff, relationships in the real world may be suffering badly.

With the average teen sending or receiving over 2,000 text messages a month and spending nine hours a week on social networking sites, experts are worried that in-person, face-to-face social interaction is beginning to take a back seat to this twitchy, impersonal, and detached form of communication. The problem: When people rely exclusively on short bursts of written communication, those doing the texting miss out on the subtleties that come with a verbal and (especially) face-to-face discussion.

As the Wall Street Journal suggests, looking at a smiley face in an email isn't the same as seeing an actual smile on an actual face, and text-addicted teens are simply failing to learn the intricacies of bodily cues like eye movement and physical motion, not to mention all the nuance that comes with verbal conversation, cues which are learned only though a lifetime of practice in the real world. The result: Many fear we are raising a generation of kids who simply can't carry on a conversation -- or even look another person in the eye.

Of course, teens aren't the only ones susceptible to this problem. As the linked story above notes, even work environments -- where technology is a critical part of getting your job done -- are struggling with the effects of laptops and cell phone messaging during the work day. The most noteworthy effect is that most meetings with more than a couple of attendees have become all but useless, as workers spend the entire time checking their phones and tapping away on Facebook, virtually ignoring the person standing at the whiteboard across the room. Now being called "continuous partial attention," the problem is now being combated by simply banning all technology from meeting rooms, much to the likely anger of those who attend the meetings.

The scary thing is that no one knows how severe the problem really is. This phenomenon is relatively new on the sociological time scale, and even attempting to study how a reliance on written messaging leads to real-world detachment is fraught with difficulty. As the WSJ notes, by the time a study could be put together to analyze the situation, any technology investigated would have changed again, making the study outdated before it was ever published.

Maybe it's just a phase? God help us.