They say reddit is the front page of the internet. If there is a front page, my kids know where it is. And on that front page, you’ll find whatever is happening now. Not now as in today, but now as in now, this very second.
They are hyper-connected.
7:00am:
Kid A wakes up. His alarm is Drake’s Jumpman. The music is coming from his phone…his phone, that is charging directly beside his bed. He starts a string in his Group Chat.
Kid B gets up late. She’s probably been awake for a while but has been scrolling through Instagram, checking Snapchat to see what she’s missed, and responding to the numerous texts in her Group Chats.
Breakfast consists of whatever they can make that only requires one hand and part concentration. The other hand and the other part of their concentration is entirely devoted to their life, the life in their phone. But their life. Full stop.
The drive to school is a combination of the latest Vine, opening a vomiting rainbow Snapchat from their friend and sending one back with an edit that distorts their face.
Kid A says, Mom, according to Snapchat you’re going over the speed limit. Ah yes, Snapchat has a geo-location filter that tracks my movement, and tells my son that I am travelling 56km/hr, not the legislated 50km/hr.
Kid B cries, Ack! I totally forgot! I have to take $25 in for Student Council today. She knows this because the alert she set on her phone yesterday has just reminded her. Tech-win.
Bluetooth picks up Alt-J on her phone, and voila! Breezeblocks fills the speakers.
They communicate with each other with a string of phrases that make no sense to me. They’re quotes from the latest trending Vine, or from a new YouTube series they’ve been watching.
They get to school and I know this e-communication continues, well, as much as the school’s WiFi can allow.
A recent conversation with the Superintendent of our school board was enlightening. Last year, he said, they were easily exceeding their bandwidth, daily. So they doubled it. As of December, 2015, they were at 90% capacity of their doubled bandwidth.
The solution? Block the most popular apps, the ones sucking the bandwidth life out of the school: Snapchat, Instagram, Google Play, Apple Music, and Netflix. You can imagine the uproar!
The school has WiFi but it needs to support the curriculum’s need to access the Cloud, and YouTube, at times.
Remember when you were in high school (ladies, you might associate with this more), and you’d rush home after school where you just spent the entire day with your friends, to pick up the phone and call them to talk about what you just spent the entire day living and talking about?
My mom did not understand it. “You just spent the whole day with your friends! What could you possibly have to talk about??”
She so did not get it.
Fast forward to 2016. The same thing is happening. They aren’t picking up the phone to manually dial a minimum of seven numbers (we all hated when friends had 8s, 9s, and 0s in their number!), they’re sending images, video, some are accompanied with text, some have sound, some update the masses, some are just for an exclusive group.
Their friends, their conversations, their life is in the palm of their hand. It’s where they hang out.
And I hang out there too. I follow both of my kids on Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram. It’s the equivalent of my parents driving down the streets of my home town just to see what I was doing, who I was hanging out with.
While I’m not part of the Group Chats, and I can’t guarantee that what they’re talking about is appropriate, I have to think back to 1985 when I raced home to stretch the phone cord up the stairs, and around the corner, to whisper into the phone and talk about what my mom would’ve considered inappropriate.
Dinner time comes and the rule is, no phones. That’s the one time we’re all unconnected. We say grace, we share a meal and we share our day. And ultimately, one of those conversations has to do with a recent post, a conversation that happened in the Group Chat, and how “it was soooo funny, mom!”.
MediaSmarts, Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, reported in 2013 that over half of grade 11s sleep with their phones. That was in 2013. I didn’t even sleep with my phone in 2013. But I do now.
This is a different life to what I grew up in. Resisting and denying my kids access to their phones – their life – is futile. So I embrace it.
My daughter sends me celebrations on Snapchat:
And I send her my response, complete with freaky filter (note my eyes and lips!):
This is it, people. The Future. It’ll become even more unwieldy as the months go by too, as technology and communication techniques continue to shift and evolve.
Turn away and pretend you don’t see it, but it isn’t going anywhere. Open those arms of yours – I know you’ll have a phone in one hand! – and embrace it. Embrace the whole dang thing: Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and whatever else comes your way.
the new high school hallway 