This morning I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague who has two teenage children. We spoke about the need to show presence in different situations, and how that often means that the digital device in her children’s hands need to be put down. It seems obvious to those of us from Generation X and earlier, as, although we are at home in a digital world, our lives started before mobile technology was commonplace. Therefore, it’s fair to say that the values instilled around family time and being present within a situation or conversation are very much who we are. But … our learners and children of today may be quite different; they are not simply at home in a digital world — they are digitally native. Many 10-year-olds have never known a world without mention of Facebook (launched 4th February 2004) or Skype. Video chatting, Snapchatting, Instagramming, Tweeting and Googling are all verbs they have grown up with.

So, is it not fair to generalise that young learners of the new millennium are unlikely to remember a world without touchscreen smartphones, video chatting, and social media? This is the distinguishing feature between being at home in a digital world and being digitally native. Therefore, I wonder just how can we expect our students and children to understand the concept of ’presence’ in conversation or activity, as one where a device is not an additional focus? Of course, most of us continue to model. I know many families (including my own) who ask that cell phones and devices are not brought to the dinner table. I know several who have ‘scheduled’ family time, time spent talking, engaging and sharing without the distraction of a laptop screen or television in the background. The initial frustration of adolescent children is to be expected. “Why are you taking my connections away?” “ Why can’t I have both a conversation with you and text my friends?” An adult response of ‘Because I said so…’ just isn’t going to cut it.

The counter argument could be to change our values and beliefs and allow them to evolve in the same way technology has. However I’m sure this would be met with greater resistance than we receive from learners at present. So, perhaps there’s a need for explicit expectations to be shared. It isn’t a case of who is right and who is wrong, more a case of two differing perspectives that both have valid reasoning and argument. The digitally native adolescent has every right to question the value being put to them, they know no different. Our value comes from a time where our life wasn’t as dominated by mobile technology. Isn’t it our job to explain so our learners and children can learn?

It becomes a question of the ‘How’ we share the explicit expectation. Using search terms like ‘Mobile Device etiquette’ brings dozens of blogs and pages designed to instruct people on how to behave in a ‘socially acceptable’ way, but the vast majority begin with ‘Don’t…’

From the beginning, some relationships are wrought with contradictions and ambiguities. They never quite find a secure foothold in our lives, and yet they can linger in the background and exist in ways we may celebrate one moment and take for granted in the next. If they survive long enough, these relationships form an arc that evolves with us over time to reflect who we are as individuals and in the context of our communities.

So goes my relationship with social media.

To call it a love/hate kind of relationship would be inaccurate. Rather, I’d say the nuances are a bit more complicated, and certainly resembling characteristics of what it means to experience a kind of adolescence in a digital platform.

On one hand, I very much rely on social media to stay connected to my friends and family both locally and overseas. Even if I’m not in regular contact with many of them, it’s good to know that I can reach out to these people if I need to.  I’ve let a lot of email contacts wither into old tombstones in my contact list, while something like Facebook keeps not just a steady vigil, but a media rich shrine. I know that I’m not entirely comfortable with this, and yet I’m not sure what the best alternative is either. That’s the ‘other hand’, and one that I’m definitely uneasy with: social media can also be a playground for a strange new kind of voyeurism and exhibitionism.

There’s the allure to the relatively new phenomenon of what writer Clive Thompson describes as ‘ambient awareness’ – knowing what’s going in someone else’s life without actually engaging directly with them. So, you might have missed the weekend community BBQ, but don’t worry, thanks to a plethora of social media channels, you can experience it all with vast quantities of evidence strewn in great detail. The trouble is, the ‘detail’ often covers vast surface levels, rather than anything very thoughtful or deeply engaging. How many of us are increasingly living our lives this way? We’ve made room for these little portals in small increments, gradually engaging more and more with a variety of media and through social connections that would otherwise not have been possible. If we stand back and look at our digital behaviours from afar and compare them to what they were even five years ago, we can get a better sense of their impact.