A couple of things on my mind

Before Facebook really took over, you came home to your family, and that environment, in a relative way, was sealed. There was no way to know what was happening somewhere else. If you wanted to hear from one of your friends, you were forced, through the telephone, to talk to them directly (and also forced, occasionally, to talk to one of your friends’ parents first). And so what would actually occur is a virtual playdate, not anything strictly observant. You shared your school life with your school, and you shared your home life with your family, and the overlap, when it occurred, was organized tribally, with friends becoming family friends becoming de facto family.

Facebook, and the way of doing social media it ushered in, changed all that. Facebook gave the youth of the nation something like a town square. You have your day at school. Then, once home, you log on and see how everyone felt about it. Or maybe you just see what everyone is doing next. But you see. You observe from the outside. The ability to both provide and learn information outside of a direct conversation has done away with the middle man. And of course, you see your friends doing it, you figure that’s just the way things are done. You start sharing, too. And now you’re away from the family

So now kids don’t have any practice talking on the phone, and it terrifies them. They prefer texting because it’s close to a social media message, text on a screen, more practice dealing with that. But the much more terrifying effect is the dynamic now introduced into social life. Namely, real life becomes raw material for posting. Kids have internalized the idea of reporting their life to their town square. The bigger the square, the more validating the reporting feels. And the most terrifying part is knowing kids grow up