Most of the time (okay, all of the time), my Facebook/Twitter/Instagram feeds make me incredibly grateful that I am 36 years old. I navigated my way through middle school and high school without social media. Without a smartphone. Or Google. Well okay, I do feel as though my high school education could have stood a little Google in it. But other than the lack of Google and resultant necessity of gathering research from actual books, I think we managed to do okay. It probably doesn’t hurt either that my husband and I have been together for 17 years so our relationship definitely pre-dates any Liking, Following, or Commenting angst.
Millennial teens are the pioneers of digital relationships, both platonic and romantic. If the online activities of my teenage son and his friends are any indicator, it’s an experience that’s both exhilarating and exhausting. They’re always on. 24/7, in fact. Sometimes wrestling the electronic device from his hand seems inevitable, it’s like a limb or something. They do socialize in person, seeing movies, hitting the swimming pool in the summer, attending those always excruciating school-sponsored social activities. They’re getting together, in the same room, ostensibly interacting with one another, but they’re doing it with their iPhones glued to their hands. And the kicker is this: I never let my son leave home without it. How else will I know when he needs a ride home? Find my iPhone isn’t a very good checker-upper if the iPhone in question is sitting on the kitchen table at home.
In my day, we didn’t walk to school and back both ways uphill in fourteen feet of snow, our backs pelted with soccer ball sized hail. No. In my day we made due with phone booths. And they cost $.25 a call, too.
The phone booth offered us another advantage, one I’m only just beginning to see the value in. We just picked up the phone and spoke. The same words we always used. A few months ago my son needed a ride home from band practice. I gave him the usual spiel about where to be, don’t forget your backpack, etc. He replied with ‘Akai’. It took me a minute to decipher that. Okay. He means okay. He could have just said ‘okay’. Or even ‘ok’.
I caught the gist of that study on the role of the period in computer-mediated communications in a few different online articles, and I have to admit, it kind of threw me. I use punctuation. In texts. Facebook posts, emails, to-do lists, they all have periods and commas where periods and commas should go.
HOW? This made no sense to me. That’s sloppy, right? It’s like using ‘UR' instead of ‘your’ or ‘ppl’ instead of ‘people’. Smartphones relieved us of the 140-character minimum, and, Twitter aside, web-based social networking doesn’t limit how much you can say, so why not spell? Punctuate? Is the period just too final? Did threaded messaging present us with both longer message capability and a fresh new way to feel socially awkward? Maybe the sentence-final period is the Millennial version of “You hang up.” “No, you.” “You first.” “Same time, count of three!”
So I started paying a little more attention to my son and his friends’ interactions online. As a rule, they don’t punctuate much. They misspell things on purpose. They use emojis to form entire sentences. Frankly, it was kind of fascinating. They’re interacting, they’re socializing. They’re creating fan fiction on Wattpad and microblogging about anime and Minecraft on Tumblr.
These are the new digital social cues. I felt like I needed some kind of ‘For Dummies’ handbook at first, but watch long enough and you figure out that not only are they getting everything from stories to daily chit chat across to each other, they’re imparting joy, anger, sadness, and sarcasm to each other. In a lot of cases, it's a pretty decent illustration of the concepts Julie Beck discusses in her article on depression and happiness spreading like contagion through the nodes of social networks. Sure, it can go both ways. But that phenomenon is clearly visible in the online realms of Millennial teens.
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