An ethnographic study of U.S. high schoolers highlights their ambivalence toward communication technologies.
Cellphones have come to occupy increasingly important roles in everyone’s lives, from the bedroom to the supermarket, the classroom to the car. People use these hand-held computers for all manner of tasks and feel acutely anxious when they don’t work. Sometimes, when facing a forced separation, they hear phantom ringing or experience mental anguish.
Some social scientists have taken a very dim view of cellphone technologies. In 2011, sociologist Sherry Turkle argued that cellphones render us “alone in a crowd.” In 2017, psychologist Jean M. Twenge made dire pronouncements about the younger “i-generation” being more distracted and less empathetic. The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma promoted a dystopian view of these technologies from the perspective of social media system designers.
These stories play against skeptics who see these new technologies as driving the decline of local cultures. They also resonate with our research of high schoolers in Washington, D.C. Helen’s parents removed her bedroom door in response to what they felt was her excessive cellphone use. Helen’s near-constant phone use resulted, she said, from FOMO . This gave her a preoccupation, for example, with maintaining her Snapchat streaks, which record the unbroken number of days she has communicated with a friend. The resulting feeling of accountability to her friends’ technologically mediated demands often conflicted with her feeling of accountability to her mother’s world of face-to-face responsibilities.
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