Proximity and Relations

After the height of the pandemic, I was in need of a part time job so I went out around my town and looked for one. I applied to a few places but the place that accepted me immediately was Jimmy Johns, a sandwich franchise I had once worked for in college.

As usual with minimum wage jobs, there were a handful of teenage coworkers. Teenagers have changed slowly over time, revealing how old I really am. While some things changed and others hadn’t, I would gather little nuggets of information from my coworkers, learning more of the status of the high school, its local community, and what the students were like.

From stories of kids vaping in school, to having sex on campus, social media and flagrant attitudes have embolden students to take their teenage life into their own hands, rather than be subjects of high school. When once high school was an academic time-out to let hormone imbalances naturally settle, it has now become a playpen of agency for high schoolers to compliment and criticize their peers online.

While the topic of social media both dividing us and connecting us with more opportunities is a nuanced and complex topic, the topic of today’s post is actually about the absence of proximity during the pandemic and how it affected high schoolers.

Despite it being early for academic backed papers to come out and address how the pandemic has affected education on an academic level, kids are already describing how the pandemic has affected education on a social level.

The most succinct explanation I got was “they just don’t know how to talk” or “they haven’t really matured” when asking about freshmen and sophomores. The high schoolers explanation was that usually middle school students have a coming of age or maturation in their first two years of high school, developing social skills and and understanding their social environment. That went out the window the two years students were learning from home, in isolation, away from their peers.

I could argue that with or without the pandemic, our younger generation has become more in tune with their phone world than with our shared world, which has several implications on its own, including the inability to communicate with generations that lacked this technology. My previous post, Digital Integration and the Chinese Room, covers how technology and social media have changed our communication.

Social media and our digital evolution is only a part of the equation in why the teenage social atmosphere is the way it is. The other half will be largely influenced by an absence of proximity, caused by large issues like the pandemic ranging to small issues like service on demand.

I’d like to touch on the topic of dating in the digital age as well as further touch on the topic of disconnected communities, within education and other sectors. For now, I’d like to leave off with a question. Technology has created new avenues for old needs, allowing us to do age-old activities in new ways. What are some ways technology could help us do new activities, in age-old ways?