How Technology Helps You Stay Connected

Staying connected to friends and family is important for our emotional health and well-being. Lots of people use one way of communicating — like text messaging — to get a friend’s attention and then switch to another where they can talk in more detail. Some news is more fun to share when you can see or hear a friend’s reaction in person.

Technology Can Help Our Social Lives
Technology helps people do everything from planning to meet for a movie to keeping in touch with a friend who lives in a different country.
Text messaging or IM seem to work for lots of people. But other people prefer to call. Email, IM, and other low-cost methods of communication also help people maintain long-distance friendships in ways they couldn’t have even a few years ago.Email, IM, and other low-cost ways of keeping in touch also allow people to develop brief acquaintances into long-lasting friendships.

Technology Can Help Solve Problems
Whether you’re struggling with a math problem at midnight or need to talk about something personal, technology helps you reach out and get the help you need.

Homework Help
Cell phones and online communications are the methods most of you use to get homework help late at night.

Personal Problems
Online communication methods like email and IM can be a great way for some people to manage personal problems — even if it just means venting and getting things off your chest. For lots of you, it’s most important to get support while still keeping things private when discussing personal problems online. Privacy is one reason lots of people like to talk about personal stuff in person. Not everyone wants to talk problems over in person, though. The bottom line is that different things work for different people and you just have to do what works best for you. It may not be the same thing that works for your friends, but that’s OK.

Of course, the key to making technology work for you is using it wisely. We all know people who have found themselves in trouble when an email or text message they sent was forwarded to the wrong person or read — and spread — by other people.

Just like anything else, technology is best kept in perspective. If you think you’re using it too much, you probably are! Pamela summed it up nicely when she made this comment about IM: "Beware! It’s addicting!"

Teens Health