SocialSphere, Inc.

I’ve spent a busy, happy Christmas week with a house full of Millennials, both college and high school students. The kids have been terrific. We have enjoyed lots of good food and good conversation. This old house has rocked to their laughter and their music. But, we are never alone because none of these kids is ever alone.

They travel with their community. Eight hundred Facebook friends are just a few clicks away, and the news river never stops.

Their cell phones are a presence in themselves. When they aren’t buzzing or playing a ripped ringtone, they are laying in wait, wires snaking everywhere as they charge themselves for the next aural onslaught.

The kids are not only technologically connected. They use the technology to stay physically connected at all times. Party’s can be organized in minutes. Skiing or skating expeditions go viral at light speed. Plans are unnecessary because they morph on the fly, by means of total and instant connectedness. The poor kid who has lost his cell phone is literally out of it, a leper until he finds it again.

Boyfriends and girlfriends are never out of reach. Not much is communicated in text messages, but the ever-present possibility of communication seems somehow to take on a poignancy of its own.

Teachers now scan their classrooms for under-desk texters. Parents at the family dinner table do it too. I wonder how these Millennials will learn to be present in the moment, when they are virtually present in everyone else’s moment, all the time. Learning to put those cell phones aside, firmly and mindfully, for the length of a leisurely family dinner may be more than a triumph of good manners and parental authority. Putting down the phone for an hour may offer over-connected kids an insight into the “old’ meanings of privacy, personal space and being a fully present member of a family.

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