As we head towards the end of the year, one aspect of our modern world hasn’t changed over the past 4-6 years—-communication continues to evolve. Wired Magazine has yet again brought forward a wonderful article about this; the subtitle or description of the article says “social media is real life, with its own arcane rules and etiquette.” If you are anyone older than 25, especially if you are a teacher or a boss working with this rising young adult generation, you should read this article.
I’ve been raising this alarm here for some time. Two years ago I wrote this: “But at the same time, it is easy to see the challenge to our culture and how we exist as a society of people together. At the end of the day, if nothing else, we have lost any sense that in the midst of the multitude of methods to communicate that we really are talking to one another. I Facebook you, but you Twitter, while our third friend mostly does Instagram. That person’s friend spends all their time on Pinterest, but other friends are in Google Hangouts. Email, Kik, Vine, Snapchat, Wechat, Path…on and on. The impact is a desperate race to keep up, or the resignation that I can’t keep up which means I no longer am in contact.”
That Balkanization concept has nearly ruined communication. At the College, we will often send out emails….that is now almost like sending carrier pigeons in the 1950s when telephones ruled the world of communication. And of course, predictably, there is a constant battle to get employees and students to know what is going on. In every class I teach, students lose points, fail to get work in on time and are generally unaware of important information I have sent them. Equally, I know that generally 60-75% of our employees, or at least the professors, also fail to know of meetings, fail to contribute to conversations on work we are doing and are generally unaware of important information sent. I have seen student email accounts with 200, 350, 500+ unread emails; I’ve sat beside administrators at the highest level at the College who have thousands of unread emails on their devices.
The students, as I noted above, have shifted to Snapchat as their lead communication tool. My professor friend Robert McCaffrey saw this first hand back in 2013. As I wrote about his experience, what is perhaps most interesting is that what old people like me consider a new platform, Facebook, is now considered quaint, maybe archaic…certainly not where the majority of the under-25 crowd is. Oh, they all have Facebook…it’s now similar to the public personal websites that people built in the late 1990s and early ’00s…a place to have a profile with some pictures and carefully curated information. As the Wired article put it, “teens largely don’t use Facebook to talk to each other…they use it primarily to communicate with unseen adult forces….”
Give the article a read. As we head toward 2017, with a new President coming and continued national crisis or tension, both at the larger civic level and in our smaller personal interactions, communication continues to be a shifting landscape. Sad news is that even as we try to create best tools for our businesses or personal lives, we still are in a situation where there are no rules. Maybe worse is that with many of these social media tools, it is the teens themselves who are creating the rules as we go along.
Or, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the adults can follow along and find better communication after all.