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Today’s Youth Advisory Board post is from Liz Funk, who takes a look at the extra anxiety Blackberry/smartphone wielding college students face by being accessible via email at all hours. Remember, you can communicate directly with any member of the Ypulse Youth Advisory Board by emailing them at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com…or just leave a comment.

Gen Y Learns There’s No Clocking Out When You’re Always Plugged In

The other day I was waiting in line at my tanning salon, checking my emails on my Blackberry (like I usually do when I have any kind of downtime during the day) when I received a rather snarky, offensive email from someone who I was considering working with. I had gone tanning to relax and enjoy some fake sunshine, but instead I was slightly fuming the following hour — and it wasn’t just my skin.

This actually has been happening to me a lot lately. I was on a trip a few weeks ago that was half-work/ half-vacation, and checking my Blackberry exposed me to some stressors that I had fully intended to leave at my desk. Because I’m 20 and still a text messaging addict, I usually keep my phone on and close by in order to receive late-night messages from my best friends and sister away at college. But this habit of constantly checking my phone seems problematic when it’s midnight and I’m in bed sifting through work or school-related e-mails.

Generation Y has a diseased amount of ambition and drive; a variety of authors (including myself) have been arguing that today’s young people put far too much pressure on themselves to do more and excel. And our technology habit — namely, our PDAs — feed into our unhealthy drive, because when the world wide web is in our pockets we can’t ever get away from work and/or school. If students have a PDA, and they’re at a party, they can easily be distracted by an email from one of their insomniac professors delivering her reactions to a recent paper they wrote or by a pleading partner from a group project reminding them of their workload — rather than being in the moment and enjoying the party! Today’s teens and college students have no concept of a work-life balance, and while young people have never been known to keep regular schedules, in a generation that is more sleep-deprived, stressed-out, and distracted than ever, it would be much healthier if young people were able to completely chill out during their leisure time, and save their emails for the school week or the daytime.

One important puzzle piece here is that many teens and college students don’t turn their phones off… ever. When I was at a conference for youth activists in Washington, a group of people were talking about their cell phones, and not one person could remember the last time she turned off her phone.

When teens and twentysomethings spend their downtime keenly aware that they have tasks pouring into their Blackberries or iPhones it’s hard to ignore the urge to respond — maybe they’ll send a quick email while driving or while a friend has gotten up to use the bathroom at dinner. It makes leisure time a blurry period in between work and school, rather than a peaceful and completely restorative activity.

There are features on the Blackberry where you can hide your inbox so messages aren’t displayed on the screen until you elect to have them there again. Also, if you use your phone as an alarm clock, the Blackberry still sounds at the designated time even if it’s turned off for the evening. I would encourage college students to give themselves a “PDA/ email schedule” and resolve not to check their email or their phones after a certain time on weeknights and a certain time on weekends, so they could still have a life outside of their work and school obligations free from stress. And without sounding like a radical, I would also encourage my peers to leave their phones at home or in the glove compartments of their cars while they’re going out. (After all, nothing is more annoying than someone who is on her phone for the duration of an evening). I think we’d be amazed what we see and experience when we’re not perpetually glancing at our palms.

In my own life I’ve made a few long term goals: Move somewhere warm. Publish a novel. Have a screenplay produced. Learn to surf. Buy a poodle and name it Oodles (little bit of trivia: what 90’s kids show mentioned a poodle named Oodles?). And at some point, live without a PDA.

About Liz

Liz Funk is a published author, freelance writer and college student. She has written for USA Today, Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, Girls’ Life, and CosmoGIRL!, among other publications. Her first book, Supergirls Speak Out, about the pressure on girls to be perfect, wwas published by Simon and Schuster in March of 2009. She writes a blog for the Albany, NY newspaper the Times Union and she edits the teen culture and politics blog GirlHeadQuarters.org. She is a senior at Pace University and lives in Manhattan. Her web-site is www.lizfunk.com.

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Categorized under: Collegians, Youth Advisory Board

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