Tech Choices Dictate Teen Friendships During Pandemic

I interviewed five teenagers across the country to learn what nearly a year of living virtually has been like for them. A common theme is that their tech choices—or those of their parents and even their friends’ parents—dictate with whom they have stayed in touch. That was the case, to some extent, before the Covid-19 pandemic, but it has become starker in the months since many in-person interactions came to an abrupt end in March.

Nearly half of the 849 teens surveyed by Common Sense Media late last spring reported feeling less connected than usual with their friends after schools closed. Students who had once talked to certain friends every day in the school cafeteria or in the hallway suddenly lost touch with all but their closest pals once schools shut down, unless they happened to be connected on the same social-media apps. Some even lost touch with their best friends because of the technology they do or don’t use.

Here is how these teenagers say technology has dictated their friendships in the months since the pandemic altered their social interactions.

Ian Pase, a 16-year-old from Anaheim Hills, Calif., who has attended his public school remotely since the spring, prefers Snapchat to keep in touch with friends. “There are a lot of people who I’m not superclose friends with who I liked talking to in class but we don’t have each other’s social media so we can’t really communicate anymore,” he said. “I also have friends who don’t have Snapchat because their parents don’t allow them to have it. They use Instagram to text each other so there’s kind of a disconnect.”

His best friend isn’t allowed to use Snapchat, and they only talk now during socially distanced lacrosse practice.

So why not spend more time on Instagram? “Instagram wasn’t built primarily to message people; it was meant to be a photo-sharing app. Snapchat was meant to message people and it feels more versatile,” Ian said. “It’s harder to message someone when they’re using a different form of primary communication than you are. It’s like writing a letter to someone who only does phone calls.”

Aiko Ma, a 17-year-old from Carlisle, Mass., disabled her Instagram account last year because, she said, “I wanted to stop thinking so much about what other people thought.”

But then she realized she was missing out on group chats she enjoyed having over Instagram with friends she had met through a student entrepreneurship program. She created a new Instagram account that didn’t have any of the connections of the old one just so she could participate in group chats with those friends. “I was almost using it like a burner phone,” she said.

She communicates with school friends mostly through iMessage and FaceTime. “I’ve had some friends who use Facebook Messenger, but I’m never on that,” she said. “Where you communicate is defined by where everyone else is.”

Aubrey Eytchison’s parents didn’t allow her to have a smartphone until she could pay her own phone bill. The 18-year-old home-school student from Brentwood, Tenn., has a part-time job and pays her own phone bill now, but still chooses to have one without internet access. As a result, she doesn’t look at her phone much and has lost touch with some people she can’t see in person.

“There’s definitely been a strain in terms of keeping up relationships because the majority of people my age are totally fine with just texting back and forth nonstop. I hate texting and I hate my phone,” she said.

Her closest friends have been proactive about reaching out. “If a few of my friends had not been texting me and texting me and texting me until I replied, I probably never would have gotten back to them,” she said. “I prefer emailing people to pretty much any other form of communication, except for maybe talking on the phone. I will answer an email much faster than I will answer a text.”

ForMulenga Malama, a 17-year-old from San Luis Obispo, Calif., the ability to stay in touch with friends wasn’t the issue, because most of his friends are on Snapchat. The problem was staying in touch with too many people.

He has been culling his list of social-media contacts in an effort to build deeper connections with his closest friends. At a peak, he said, he regularly chatted with about 35 people, but he began whittling down the number as he progressed through high school. “Quarantine helped speed up that process,” he said. “You kind of cut people off, not because you don’t like them but because it begins to feel like an unnecessary burden. There was a realization of social drain.”

“When you reach out to too many people, you become overwhelmed with responding,” he added. “I probably Snapchat 20 people max right now because I think sometimes if you Snapchat too many people, it loses its meaning.”

Athena Burns, a 13-year-old in Washington, D.C., has lost touch with some friends who don’t have their own phones and rely on their parents to set up times to text using their phones. One friend, in particular, she said, has been hard to reach because of that and can’t be included in group texts very often. Other friends aren’t allowed to be on social media, which is Athena’s preferred way of staying in touch. She mainly uses TikTok to message friends and share videos and her circle of friends is now focused on those who are also on TikTok.

Athena attends a private school in person now, but one of her closest friends attends school virtually. Athena hasn’t been sharing as much with her out of respect for her feelings. “I choose not to tell her some things,” she said. “I don’t want her to feel left out.”

Losing touch with several friends has made Athena regret how she left school last spring, unaware she would be separated from some people for many months, she said. “I would have loved to go back to that last day of school and just say goodbye to all my friends,” Athena said.

She added that, in the future, she plans to share her insights with people who didn’t live through 2020, to “always be thankful that you have friends and to always remember every moment you spend with somebody.”

Write to Julie Jargon at [email protected]