Hello, this is your mother calling!

The inspiration for this hub is because as I am sitting in my lounge room doing some work on my laptop I became acutely aware of the tap tap tapping of another keyboard. Then it hit me! I am sitting here tapping away at my laptop and about 2 metres away my fifteen year old daughter is tapping away on her laptop. There is no TV in the background, no music, just a typing frenzy.

I stopped and looked at her in that lovingly mother way, hoping she would notice and jump up and give me a big hug. However that was not my reality because when she realised that she was being watched she looked up at me and grunted 'What?" I smiled and said, "Oh nothing, I just realised how bizarre this set up is with us both sitting here not talking and typing away". The reply was "No it's not"....so my response was "I just want to talk to you, maybe we could chat online to each other?" Of course I thought I was being funny, however the sad truth is, it would probably be a good way to get her to talk, well ... it would be if she could fit me in on the chat with all the other people she is chatting to at the same time.

A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours. _{^{Source: Kaiser Family Foundation}}

The above figures are outstanding but at least I take comfort in the fact that we may not be communicating with our mouths but at least we are spending time together, side by side in cyberspace. I remember when my other daughter's mobile stopped working a couple of years ago and the tantrum and carry on that went with it because in her world she had no way of communicating with her friends. I suggested she could pick the phone up and speak to them instead and the response she gave ended up with her being grounded for a week!

I look back to when I was fifteen, when computers were in science fiction shows, when talking on a mobile phone was something that I thought I would never see, when video conferencing was too way out there for words and we communicated via hand written letters and by using our mouths!

As I am finishing off this hub, I decided to be funny and send an sms to my daughter who is right next to me typing away. I sms'd "Hi" and at least it got her to speak to me briefly when she stopped and said "Mum don't do that, I am expecting a text".

I give up!

Debbie Carr is a professional recruitment consultant, Director of True Colours Recruitment and Agent for Professional Speakers.