Open Book: Can We Talk?
Can We Talk?
Connecting In Person Beats Texting Any Day
By Anya Nitczynski
For the GPHN
This year, my best friend and I rediscovered a set of email exchanges from elementary school. With a plethora of emojis and zero punctuation marks, I wished her happy birthday. That was in October 2015. She didn’t respond until April 2017.
And while I intend to hold her late reply against her forever (did my emojis mean nothing to you, Cammie?) the truth is her delay wasn’t out of the ordinary. It was how all of our peers emailed — the first access we had to any sort of direct messaging.
As I received plenty of timely responses from Cammie over text this summer, I thought about how modes of communication change and impact the relationships between my peers.
Summer break is perhaps the most revealing time of year to evaluate how and what adolescents communicate about. Students aren’t guaranteed to see each other for months — there are no hallways to wave at each other or projects to work on together. Students aren’t bound by any sort of obligation to their peers beyond desire.
This plagued me in early middle school. Summer break meant the chore of staying in touch with my friends primarily via text and social media. It meant going to the mall together took weeks of planning.
It meant Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok felt less like apps and more like a watering hole. I wasn’t alone. A Pew Research Center study found the most common places teens see friends are school (where 83 percent of teens reported regular interaction), someone’s house (58 percent), and online (55 percent). The small margin between the latter two is what I experienced. Connection in person back then was almost interchangeable with digital connection.
Now, summer is a blessing. Seeing only the people I want puts me into an immediate state of zen. My friends and I text less than we used to, and long exchanges or extensive time on the phone is rare, but we see each other essentially every day. Weeks of texting to make plans have been swapped for a five-word message: “Are you free right now?”
Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok feel more like“media” than they do “social.” I deleted TikTok last summer and I have yet to feel any social impact from it. I think a large part of the reason why we made the shift away from online interaction is the pandemic, which taught us to never take connecting in person for granted. I think it’s also a natural effect of being my age, with the Anya Research Center finding that my mom saw her friends roughly the same amount during her summer breaks as a teenager.
My mom’s experience and mine differ in that I make a conscious choice every day to put digital interactions on the back burner. (She didn’t have that option.) I still text certain people a lot, but it isn’t the foundation of our relationships because we choose it not to be. For me, the overall trend toward real-life and real-world connections is encouraging.
Anya Nitczynski is a rising senior at Denver School of the Arts. Her column appears regularly on these pages.