This is how teens woo each other online
Teens, it turns out, don’t really Tinder. But tech is, unsurprisingly, a big part of the modern high school hallway romance — it’s how today’s teens flirt, break up and creep on crushes, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center that surveyed 1,060 teens about how they use technology.
“The real big takeaway for us is the way tech is woven into teen’s romantic lives,” said Amanda Lenhart, an associate research director at Pew and the lead author on the report. “It’s absolutely part and parcel of how teens expect to communicate.”
Well, obviously. This is a generation of people who haven’t known a world without internet and smartphones. Interestingly, most teens don’t actually use the web to meet new crushes. While at least 11 percent of adults online date, teens are still mostly meeting each other in the schoolyard… or wherever it is that teens hang IRL. Only 8 percent of the teens surveyed had met a significant other digitally, with half of those saying it was through Facebook.
Instead, sites like Facebook have become digital extensions of high school hallways, and have made communicating a crush more complicated and nuanced. No longer does shooting a crush longing glances at their locker suffice — instead it’s a balance of real life flirting, Facebook friending, liking, commenting and scoping a crush out online to see what they’re like. Half of the surveyed teens flirted by friending a crush online and then liking or commenting on their posts and photos to signal interest. Obviously, this would undo the drama of pretty much every prime time teen TV show of the 1990s. Just reimagine all of My So Called Life’s hormone-fueled hallway scenes with Angela standing at her locker subtly liking everything Jordan Catalano posted on Facebook.
A lot of teens were also not above a little cyberstalking. One in five said they had used social networks to find new love interests by following or friending someone a friend suggested they might be interested in. The trick, teens told researchers, is not to reveal that you’ve been stalking.