By Trevor Williams ’13, Staff Writer

Social etiquette is important. Ever since we were in preschool, our teachers, parents, and mentors have hammered that message home. They make sure that if we only take one lesson with us from our childhoods, it is this: If you cannot get along with the people around you, you are not going to be very happy or very successful. For without the ability to interact with others, you are a prisoner of the worst kind. You are a prisoner of your own heart.

Right now, our traditional standards of social etiquette are under assault. We are all witnesses to revolutionary changes in the way that we communicate with one another. We no longer give our undivided attention to everything we do or everyone we speak with. With the explosion of social media and networking, we can act like we are in several places at once. For better or for worse, the new “norms” are here to stay. But we must each do our best to prevent those new standards from ruining us. We must ensure that we do not lose the invaluable ability to get along with the world around us.

One of the chief components of the aforementioned sea of change has been the evolving etiquette of text messaging. Texting someone while in a face-to-face conversation with someone else is an activity which might have been considered taboo just a few years ago. Yet now it is widely regarded to be socially acceptable, at least among a plurality of adolescents and young adults. Even as I was discussing this article with my editor, he pulled out his cell phone and began tapping away.

Our school is no exception; the Newark Academy community is fully engaged in this etiquette revolution (or tragic downfall as the case may be). The student body collectively sends hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of text messages per year. Take a stroll through the halls of NA and you will be hard pressed not to see virtual conversations unfolding before your eyes. With the proliferation and popularity of texting, it is almost impossible to avoid. New forms of networking and social media have touched every corner of our lives. Whether the intrusion is welcome or not, we are living with new standards of social interaction.

As members of the millennial generation, many of us are apt to give at least begrudging acceptance to these new standards. If we do not embrace them, we at least tolerate them in ways that older people do not and probably never will. If you refused to be friends with anyone who texted other people while they were with you, you would not have a very large social circle. That said, we should not be so quick to embrace the “texting while talking” phenomena so blindly and unconditionally. In fact, this goes for almost all forms of networking and digital communication. We cannot yet anticipate the consequences of our social media addictions. All we can be certain of is that the ways in which we communicate with each other continue to evolve more and more rapidly and soon we may struggle to keep up.

We cannot change the attitudes of an entire generation. We are largely stuck with the reality of digital communication. We will continue to be stuck there until another, more exciting social media outlet comes along. All the same, though, we can strive to maintain the integrity of our social etiquette. We can realize the importance of interacting with the world around us, and we can make sure that we do not lose one of the most important abilities of all.