You've hit the nail on the head with the group chat problem. Among my students, a surprising number of them are not on social media or have limited social media access (its an unusual group of kids and definitely not a typical youth ministry situation), but group texts/DMs aren't only ubiquitous among the kids, but even youth leaders even run group texts with the students they lead. Keeping that one kid without a phone informed and in the loop apart from the group text is a challenge sometimes.
Ugh, yeah, I can imagine. And it's not like group chats are themselves bad! We can imagine ways they'd go bad, of course, but generally I think they're good and useful.
But the tendency to use OS-neutral mobile apps (because the mixed iPhone/Android group chat function isn't great) strongly encourages smartphone use specifically, as a lot of those apps don't work (or don't work as well) on other devices.
You've hit the nail on the head with the group chat problem. Among my students, a surprising number of them are not on social media or have limited social media access (its an unusual group of kids and definitely not a typical youth ministry situation), but group texts/DMs aren't only ubiquitous among the kids, but even youth leaders even run group texts with the students they lead. Keeping that one kid without a phone informed and in the loop apart from the group text is a challenge sometimes.
Ugh, yeah, I can imagine. And it's not like group chats are themselves bad! We can imagine ways they'd go bad, of course, but generally I think they're good and useful.
But the tendency to use OS-neutral mobile apps (because the mixed iPhone/Android group chat function isn't great) strongly encourages smartphone use specifically, as a lot of those apps don't work (or don't work as well) on other devices.