[DR_The_Like_Switch

I once invited two students to the front of the room at the beginning of a lecture and had them sit face-toface
in chairs. I asked them to talk to each other for five minutes. They looked puzzled and asked what they
should talk about. I told them to talk about anything they wanted to. They couldn’t come up with a single
subject! They just sat there and stared at each other. I then instructed them to turn their chairs back to back,
and text each other about anything. Amazingly, they had no problem conversing with each other via text
for the five minutes.
And therein lies a problem. In the days before cell phones and video games, kids would learn basic social
skills during face-to-face interactions on the playground. They learned all about making friends and how to
deal with conflict and interpersonal differences; that’s where social skills were picked up. Along the way,
kids learned how to read and transmit subtle nonverbal signals, even if they were not consciously aware of
it.
In today’s “thumb-talking” world, nobody plays ball like generations of pre–cell phone children used to.
Kids stay home and play video games and text one another. Sure, there are some organized sports and
school activities, but face-to-face social interaction has been drastically reduced in our tech-savvy world.
That’s bad. It’s not that “tech-raised” kids lack the capacity to pick up on social skills and signals; it’s that
they don’t have enough practice to hone these skills and become effective in handling face-to-face relations.