I am studying the influence of Web 2.0 technologies on Millennial Generation students’ interpersonal communication skills and abilities. The Millennial students I teach are all around 20 years old. But the influence of technology seems to take hold at a very early age.

I was looking out a restaurant window last Wednesday evening when an SUV pulled up and stopped in the parking lot. Mom was apparently letting her two daughters out to enter the restaurant while she parked the vehicle. I could see one daughter, a high schooler I’d guess, opening the side door to help her younger sister out. They both came around the back of the SUV and crossed the parking lot in route to the front door of the restaurant.

Like ducks in a row, the older led the younger. The older girl, about 15 or 16, was texting like crazy as she walked unconcerned across the parking lot. Her little sister, who could not have been more than 4 years old, was doing the same thing on what I assume was a toy cell phone.

There’s the future, I thought. That is, if fortunately for them, no speeding vehicle shortens their days, because each was too absorbed in her texting to notice little things like oncoming traffic.

The Pew Research Center finds that 75 percent of Americans ages 12 to 17 own a cell phone, and the age at which kids  get their first phone is dropping. If what I saw at the restaurant is any gauge, it is dropping really low.

Pew reports that 66 percent of users use their phones for texting. It is sometimes carried to extremes, like the Japanese teenagers who use Ziploc bags to keep their phones waterproof while they use them in the bath. In Japan, 20 percent of high school girls have not only one, but two, cell phones, and some own even more. These teenagers stay on the phone “all the time” as one of them put it.

What concerns me is how technology is used by my mostly Millennial Generation students. They seem to build and maintain relationships via technology and not personal contact. Web 2.0 technologies are exciting and useful, but are they having a negative effect on Millennials’ ability to communicate face to face? When they enter the job market, employers will expect excellent interpersonal communication skills.

Seeing the 4-year-old play at texting while crossing a busy thoroughfare concerns me. But I am more concerned about my current Millennial students who are such heavy users of Web 2.o technologies. Can they engage in interesting, effective two-way communication? I hope my research will help me answer this question.

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