Current generation remains the same as the last, social media apart

One generation ago.

In 1971, the first email was sent. It said ‘QWERTYUIOP’ and it landed on a machine right next to the one it was sent from, in a room at Cambridge, Mass. The electronically transmitted mail was only the whisper of a phenomenon that would soon disseminate to 1.79 billion people across the world.

Enter the 21st century, and this phenomenon became ‘social networking’. But as of now, for people like Michael Brock, current IB coordinator at Coppell High School, things would not be changing yet.

Every night when he was young, Brock and his three siblings and parents sat down to dinner together, with the children sharing stories of how their day went, a book they read, or something funny or interesting. Mealtime would last for usually more than half an hour and the family sometimes flocked afterwards to watch television.

“It was a chance where we all got together and just talked about how everything went,” Brock said. “There was always a lot of laughing, a lot of smiles. I just remember always feeling that I knew everything that was going on in all of my family’s days and lives, and felt like they knew everything that was going on in mine.”

Brock’s childhood ambled ahead, with time for him to do the things he loved. Sports occupied most of his free time, and he played everything, from football to basketball to soccer. Many boys of his age had already caught the craze of video games, yet Brock hardly ever touched a joystick or pixelated screen. Sports was his preoccupation- and his social affair as well.

“Most of my free time was spent outside either pick up games or I was playing on an organized team,” Brock said. “When we used to play pickup games it was kind of conversational, you were playing but you were also chatting, just talking about your day, this teacher or that girl.”

After his high school years were over, Brock attended college at Oklahoma State University , and then at the University of Dallas.

It was as he came out of college that everyone first started using e-mail.

The current generation.

Madeleine Brock, a freshman at CHS, spends up to hours on her phone in one day. Between passing periods at school, or when she has time in class, she pulls out her phone to check text messages, Twitter, Instagram, and most constantly, Snapchat.

Snapchat is the yellow icon on 41 percent of teenagers’ phone screens in America (according to Pew Research Center’s 2015 report), and the app that has revolutionized instant photo-sending with its unique expiring pictures and filters that can swap the face of a school principal with that of Donald Trump. Every user has a “story” to tell on Snapchat, through captioned photos that last for 24 hours.

When checking her friends’ stories, Madeleine can often be found laughing at face swaps and rainbows spewing from their mouths. But Michael Brock, her father, laughs when saying that he still does not understand how to use the app, even after lessons from his daughter on how to operate it.

“I opened a Snapchat account as a way to connect with my daughter through social media,” Brock said. “ And I can’t figure out what the attraction with it is. I guess I can see one side to it- that it goes out there, the person sees it, and it’s gone. But now they started adding all these other things that you can do with the pictures and that left me way behind.”

Yet more than just a lack of comprehension of its more teenager-appealing features, Brock feels a sense of growing concern about Snapchat for his daughter and students.

“From a parent standpoint, I do worry a lot about them having a false sense of security, that there’s the perception of ‘I’ll send this and then it’s gone’.” Brock said. “I see kids all the time screenshotting everything and I worry about how much control you really think you have using [Snapchat],”

Trisha Fiene Spain, as a counselor at CHS for grades 10-12, has personally seen the impairing effects that Snapchat and other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, can have on teenagers.

“I grew up without technology, so I didn’t have that when it was important in the younger years to form relationships,” Fiene Spain said. “I look at my 14 year old son, and his ability to talk to a girl or his friends- everything is done through his phone. Even when he wants to do something with his friends, I say ‘Well, give him a call’ and he says ‘But I sent him a text’. I think, ‘why don’t you just call him?’”

Brock, although he did not often use it himself, recalled how popular talking on the phone used to be amongst his teenaged peers.

“When I was growing up, it was a huge thing,” Brock said. “Kids my age used to spend hours [talking] on the phone the way that kids now spend hours on their phones, except on social media,”

In the Brock household, the two daughters and parents are close and engage in a lot of time together. Every night, Brock has dinner with his family the way he and his siblings and parents used to, but sometimes, the distractions of each member’s online presence come in between.

“There has to be a concerted effort to keep that out because an alert goes off or a text message comes through,” Brock said. “After dinner is over, everyone goes their separate ways and is frequently involved in something on the computer. That’s the biggest thing that’s different from when I was a child and had dinner with my family.”

Despite interferences from social networks, Brock and Madeleine still sustain a very close relationship, and the father feels lucky to know her as well as he does. The parts of her he is not sure he knows well, however, are the parts that he fears exist only when the button next to her name online turns green.

“I hope I feel that way, that I know my daughter. But at the same time I do wonder if there is a second side to her life that I am not aware of,” Brock said. “I feel like we still have that connection, though I have to admit that, as a parent, I worry that I may not always know what is going on with her.”

Fiene Spain, with a 14-year-old son and hundreds of students under her care, worries about how different the interactions of the current generation are due to the trance of social networks.

“I grew up in a generation in which we said ‘hi’ to each other, even if we didn’t know each other,” Fiene Spain said. “I find myself a lot in the morning coming in and holding the doors and kids just walk by, looking down on their phones.”

However, Brock believes that his daughter, phone apart, is not really much different than he was as a teenager.

“For the most part, there are a lot more similarities than there are differences,” Brock said. “The thing that is very similar is that she is very close to her family and we were too. She likes to do a lot of the same things and has some of the same concerns; she complains about a math or science test. She giggles and laughs and has fun, for really silly things.”

In terms of their inner personalities and behavior, Fiene Spain agrees that the teenagers of the current generation are intrinsically the same as the last.

“Kids are still kids. You still hang out, you go to the movies, you go to concerts, we did all that,” she said. “I think the difference is that I see my son and his kids come over and they’re connected to a PS3. We found out where our friends were because the bikes were in the front yard.”