Gold Experience

Page 91

Is technology ruining your life?

a. Text, text, text – it’s what we do all the time; if we’re not on Facebook, that is. But are
we becoming slaves to technology? And are we becoming less sociable as a result?
John Henley investigates.
b. Sixteen-year-old Philippa Grogan can’t imagine life without her mobile. ‘I’d rather give
up a kidney than my phone,’ she jokes. ‘How did people manage before? Carrier
pigeons? Letters? Going round each other’s houses on bikes?’
c. Cameron Kirk reckons he spends ‘an hour, an hour and a half on school days’ hanging
out with his Facebook friends; maybe twice that at weekends. ‘It’s actually very
practical if you forget what that day’s homework is,’ he says. One of his best friends
doesn’t have Facebook, but they get round that problem quite easily by talking on
their Playstations. Emily Hooley, sixteen, recalls a very dark moment: ‘We went to
Wales for a week at half term to revise. There was no mobile, no TV, no broadband.
We had to drive into town just to get a signal. It was really hard, knowing people were
texting you, writing on your timeline, and you couldn’t respond.’ 1) (complete)
d. Millions of us have mobile phones and texting is now the favourite way of
communicating with friends. 2)(complete) As we all know, you can use them to take
pictures and then share these with other kids; you can listen to music, play games,
swap videos with them and access the web. And as if texting, swapping and spending
most of our waking hours stuck to our phones isn’t enough, most of us use social
networking sites. In fact, for many of us, digital communication isn’t just part of our
lives – it is our lives.
e. Amanda Lenhart is a researcher who studies the use teenagers make of the net and
their use of social networking sites in particular. 3)(complete) ‘Mobile phones and
social networking sites make the things teens have always done – nding their own
identity, becoming independent of their parents, looking cool, impressing members of
the opposite sex – a whole lot easier,’ she explains. ‘Flirting, boasting, gossiping,
teasing, hanging out, confessing: all that classic teen stuff has always happened. It’s
just that it used to happen behind the bike sheds or via notes pressed into hands in the
corridor between lessons.’
f. 4) (complete) Some people imagine teenagers may turn into screen-enslaved adults
who can’t really cope in society. But as you know, teenagers are pretty sensible about
technology on the whole. When we interviewed Callum O’Connor, who is sixteen, he
said he could see a big difference between chatting online and chatting face to face. He
said he realised you had to be really careful what you said online as it could so easily
be misinterpreted. He added that it was easy to misinterpret what other people said as
well. ‘I’m always asking myself if people will interpret my text wrongly or if I’m putting
too many kisses,’ he told us.
g. Emily, too, was pretty sure that social networking and texting weren’t changing her. 5)
(complete)‘I think of myself as quite a shy person,’ she explained, ‘so it’s actually
easier to be myself on Facebook because you can edit what you want to say; you don’t
 feel awkward. I de nitely feel more con dent online – more like the self I know I really
am, beneath the shyness.’
h. Amanda Lenhart says research shows that technology hasn’t changed face-to-face
time between teenagers; it’s just given them more ways to communicate. ‘Yes, you
can nd studies that suggest online networking can be bad for you,’ she says, ‘but other
studies show the opposite.’ 6) (complete) And parents got just as panicky about it then
as now.