Whenever I give my book talk to parents, I always get asked the same question: Are teenagers going to lose their social skills? My sense is that teens are immersed in totally wired communication using every digital tool at their disposal: IM, MySpace, texting, cell phones...They are having to learn when it's appropriate to communicate digitally and when they should talk to someone face to face and even when it's appropriate to IM or text in shorthand and when a longer correspondence is necessary. For example, most teens get that dumping someone via text message is lame (but of course some "lame" boyfriends and girlfriends still do this).

I've posted here before about the Harris Interactive study in which teens characterized their friendships that involved both online and offline communication as being more meaningful than friendships that were just face to face. Like anything else, it's all about finding the balance. My answer to parents who ask this important question is -- they are figuring it out, and they need your help.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, who has written extensively about our relationship to technology, voiced her concerns about this in a recent Forbes article. She wrote:

And what of adolescence as a time of self-reflection? We communicate with instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticons. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not intended to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. (Technological determinism has its place here: Cell calls get poor reception, are easily dropped and are optimized for texting.) The culture that grows up around the cell phone is a communications culture, but it is not necessarily a culture of self-reflection--which depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, sometimes electing to share it with another person, thinking about it differently over time. When interchanges are reduced to the shorthand of emoticon emotions, questions such as "Who am I?" and "Who are you?" are reformatted for the small screen and flattened out in the process.

A huge part of growing up are those marathon conversations you have beginning in late high school and continuing throughout college -- pondering the meaning of life, politics, religion and heartbreak at coffee shops and in dorm rooms. I think if these conversations all happened on discussion threads online, something would be lost. Maybe just looking into the bleary tired eyes of your best friend and realizing that neither of you are making sense any more and it's time to go to bed.