I live in a society and generation in which teenagers are obsessed with communicating with one another. On average teens send 3,339 text messages a month and spend a whopping 31 hours a week online, only 9 hours short of a full time job! Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube serve to take up most of those 31 hours. Going one day without sending a text message or getting online to check all the latest gossip on Facebook would surely be a crisis, but I think that is the problem.

As a generation we are losing the art of face- to- face contact. Sending a text message is much easier than actually confronting or conversing with someone in person. A teenager is more likely to say mean, nasty things that he or she would never actually have had the courage to say in person, in a text. Text messaging gives the members of the opposite sex much more confidence to talk to their crush, but then when faced with the difficult task of talking in person there is no connection because the relationship was not built on a deep, meaningful conversation but on a text based conversation.

This technology overload is causing our generation to lose social skills. When a person is used to sending instant messages on the computer and text messages from her high dollar cell phone it becomes very hard for a teen to communicate with the older generations who would prefer a face to face conversation or even a phone call to a conversation in text messages. In that way it is causing a barricade between the two generations: our parents and us. This becomes very important because that older generation is going to become our bosses someday if they aren’t already. This loss of communication between the two generations could quite possibly be very detrimental to our society.

I think we as teens should take back our generation. Technology is a great thing that makes our lives and research for school much easier, but the way teens are abusing it could make an entire generation become socially inadequate. We as a generation need to get back to building relationships through face to face conversations along with texting relationships. A smile seen with your own eyes instead of (-: or the sound of laughter instead of LOL is so much more meaningful and I think that teens should slow down on the technology overload before it spirals out of control.