New Year Reality Check
January 1, 2008 - 0 Comment(s)
Happy New Year everyone. What better way to start the new year than friends, family, football and a little dose of reality? Let me explain…
Most people in education understand or are starting to understand the fact that young people (you know, students) are using email less and less all the time. Everybody realizes that students prefer text messaging to email by a wide margin. No argument there, right? What…there are still a few disbelievers? Without going into great detail about this, let me toss some data at you…
A recent study, “Teens and Social Media”, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project states:
“Despite the power that email holds among adults as a major mode of personal and professional communication, it is not a particularly important part of the communication arsenal of today’s teens. Only 14% of all teens report sending emails to their friends every day, making it the least popular form of daily social communication on the list we queried.”
Note that there are lots of other studies and surveys that show the same findings, but I think this is enough for the moment. Now that we’re all on the same page about the decline of email and the meteoric rise of text messaging, let’s turn our attention to a related topic - social networks. We all know social networks are incredibly popular, but I’ve had some discussions recently that are a bit troubling. They’ve gone something like this:
Me: It’s amazing how seldom students use email these days.
Friend: Yes, it really is amazing. Now, students just use Facebook and MySpace to talk with each other.
Me: Well, they do spend a lot of “time” on social networking sites like Facebook, but that’s still not the main way they communicate. If they’ve got a mobile phone, that’s their #1 way to communicate. It’s their lifeline.
Friend: No way…it’s all about Facebook and MySpace. MySpace and Facebook.
Me: Well, “time on site” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the way they communicate with each other, so that’s not completely accurate
Friend: Uh, yes it is.
Me: Uh, no it’s not.
You get the picture…
Fortunately, we can return to our trusty data from the same Pew study which rank ordered teen daily social communication choices (i.e., the most popular methods of communicating with friends every day). For teens that use the internet and have mobile phones, the order, form most used/popular to least is…
1. Cell phone (talking)
2. Landline (talking)
3. Texting (text messaging)
4. Instant Messaging
5. Face to face
6. Social Networks
7. Email
Like my friend above, many people (including people at schools) I talk with believe that students use Facebook as their primary means of communication, and that if you want to reach them, you have to use Facebook. This study shows otherwise. The fact is, the mobile phone is the way students communicate….period. Although students spend a lot of time on Facebook and other social networking sites, they USE their mobile phone and send text messages more frequently to communicate. An analogy - teens living with their parents. They may spend a lot of time at home, but are they interacting and communicating with their parents all that time? Probably not. More likely they’re in their rooms, doors shut, texting, listening to music, etc. It’s the same with social networks versus mobile phones.
So, our beginning of the year reality check - if you really want to communicate with students, you can’t just go to where they hang out and expect to connect with them. If you want to communicate with them, use the tools they use everyday to communicate. Send a text! Better yet, send lots of text messages using clearTXT. Happy New Year. 8^)
