Social Media and the School


I remember reading somewhere that Facebook may not last more than one generation. That may be hard to imagine today, and no, it wasn’t based on the nothing-lasts-forever reasoning. Instead, it said teenagers don’t wants to have any contact with their parents, and so they’d never come onto Facebook, a site inhabited by people their parents’ age (shudder). Ergo, each new generation would have a new social media site, one that didn’t have parents on it!

The other mega social media outlet, WhatsApp, is the way for parents of kids in the same class to interact with each other. As a kid, I remember how one struggled to get notes for days one missed at school. Even if you had a kid from the same class in the neighbourhood, you still had to hope that the other kid took notes. But now, thanks to WhatsApp groups, that’s not a problem: Ask and ye shall received photos of the notes taken by any other kid in class.

I thought that was the only purpose of these class WhatsApp groups. Turns out there’s another use, as one parent wrote:
“Madhav doesn’t share any school news. I get to know things from here (the WhatsApp group).”
And here I thought kids not talking to their parents only happening when they become teenagers…

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