The Wall Street Journal reports:
Almost every day when they get home from school, Gracie, age 16, and Sarah, age 14, open the app Houseparty, where they can video chat with to up to seven of their friends at once. The sisters, who live in Danville, Calif., use it to socialize and collaborate on homework, for 15 minutes to an hour. When they first open it they may be chatting with just one friend, but everyone they’re connected to on Houseparty gets a push alert that they’re “in the house,” and, soon enough, the room fills up. It might even spill over into other rooms, growing organically, just like a real house party.
Teens have been hanging out online for 20 years, but in 2017 they’re doing it on group video chat apps, in a way that feels like the real thing, not just a poor substitute. Ranging in age from adolescents to their early 20s—the group loosely defined as “Generation Z”—these young people are leaving the apps open, in order to hang out casually with peers in a trend some call “live chilling.”
There's more:
In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported 73% of U.S. teens have access to a smartphone, and that figure is growing. Those teens are checking their phones on average more than 80 times a day, according to Deloitte.
It isn’t just that teens have phones, and that the infrastructure required to handle multiple simultaneous video streams is more accessible to developers than ever. It is also that teens aren’t getting out to socialize in real life like they once did. One in three teens told Pew that they hang out with friends outside of school less often than “every few days.”
That bad?
The net effect, says Ms. Odiaga, is that teens are spending more time indoors, and are less active, than ever. Studies examining time use since 1965 show a significant decline in active time accelerating in the mid-1990s, to the point that young people today are sedentary for more than 10 hours a day, says Ms. Odiaga. We’re at the point now, she adds, that the technology is also driving the trend.
Anytime a technology becomes a more perfect replacement for real interaction, it is a double-edged sword that may leave users that much more inactive and isolated. In adults, heavy social media use has been linked to depression. No one has yet studied the effects of the new video chat apps on teenage moods.
The sedentary generation in the news.
