SouthFlorida.com | Teen Link South Florida

Technology has revolutionized the way we communicate with each other.

Teens are beginning to communicate more through cell phones and computers and less through human contact, forever changing relationships between family and friends.

Interaction between friends and families has become more impersonal, especially among teens, through texting.

Some people text so often they send more than 100 texts a day.

"Texting is an amazing thing," St. Thomas Aquinas junior Erin Kent said. "You can stay in touch with family and friends across the country even if you don't have time to talk."

Instant messaging, also popular among teens, allows instant communication but creates a distraction at home.

"Technology gets in the way of spending time with the family," Archbishop McCarthy senior Connor Garavaglia said.

His frustration isn't just with IM.

"Web sites like YouTube.com lure you into watching more than just the video you wanted to watch," he said.

Sending texts and IMs makes it easy to talk to people, but the lack of human contact makes it more difficult for people to understand and interpret the tone of messages. Such communication is ambiguous and up for personal interpretation.

J.P. Taravella senior Pati Borja can testify to that.

"When I get really excited I like to type in caps on AIM, but people always think I'm yelling at them so I put a smiley face after it," she said. "It's just so easy to misinterpret people through technology."

Technology also creates a false image for many people. Because texting and chatting isn't done face to face, people act differently online; yet in person, they are a completely different person.

"I was talking to this popular guy online for a while. He was really cool online, but at school in front of his friends, he was like, 'Who are you?'" Borja said.

Despite the ease of electronic communication, speaking to someone in person is priceless, and we should never let technology take that away.