Our world is held together by the apps we use every day. From iMessage to Discord to Instagram, we are talking to hundreds of people every week, far more than we talk to in person.
Students facilitate relationships with each other through online communication. According to the American Psychological Association, the average teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media. Digital communication is used for a multitude of purposes, such as enabling the organization of clubs or simply keeping up with friends. Researchers—such as those at Yale Medicine—disagree about the validity of social media as a healthy activity, but it’s impossible to deny that online communication is, and has been, an integral part of our society.
- iMessage
iMessage is undeniably one of the most popular apps used. As it comes pre-installed on iPhones, and because practically everyone uses it, it’s almost a requirement for social interaction to use iMessage on a daily basis. To me, its basic interface is one of the most appealing features, as it’s impossible to get confused or lost in iMessage. Overall, iMessage has done exactly what it was designed to do: create a universally simple way for people to communicate with each other.
- Snapchat
Beyond iMessage, one of the more common apps to see young people using is Snapchat. The app prioritizes living in the moment, wherein users send pictures to each other, instead of focusing mainly on text messages. Another unique feature of Snapchat is that messages are deleted after a day, ensuring both privacy and that users aren’t hung up on past messages. I find the fact that most communication is done through selfies or quick pictures off putting, as it tends to place more of a focus on body image than other apps.
- Discord
Discord has been used by many students, mostly due to its “casual” environment. The app prides itself on being designed for casual, relaxed interaction, and that has drawn hundreds of thousands of users to Discord. Users are also attracted by the fact that Discord is known as a website for those playing games to talk to each other. I’ve used Discord for years, and it has become somewhat important to me. Many people I know use Discord as it is amazingly convenient for groups – just send a message into a server to ask if anyone is up for a game or two, and usually a few people will respond.
- Slack
Slack’s popularity has come from being a professional workplace. Many of its users use the app to communicate with coworkers, but it is also used by many school clubs to communicate with each other. It’s a much more professional method of communication than other options, such as Discord or iMessage. A few clubs that I am part of use Slack, and it has helped me stay on top of things in that regard. It’s much harder to ignore a message from Slack than an iMessage, as it separates the personal from the professional.
- Google Chat
Google Chat is a lesser-used communications app, mostly used for quick communication. It’s also heavily used in video communications. Many school districts relied heavily on Google Meets to facilitate long-distance learning. The website was full of bugs that always popped up during classes, and the User Interface (UI) was always hard for teachers to properly use. The main strength of Google Chat is its ability to host large numbers of participants in calls, but it has since been surpassed by other apps in that regard, such as Zoom.
While not unpopular in the U.S., WhatsApp has seen more success in other countries. Its main appeal is the heavy encryption that is offered without a backdoor. The idea of a backdoor is that the proper authorities can find and read your messages if they have reason to do so. Because WhatsApp doesn’t have this, messages can only be read by those you send them to. This means pretty much nothing to the common citizen, but to those with heavy concerns about privacy, WhatsApp has been very alluring. In fact, in recent times, WhatsApp has garnered attention with terrorists using it much more heavily, which has mildly decreased its user counts. For Americans, a big appeal to WhatsApp is its simplicity of use out of the country. Data cards often don’t extend outside of the country they are bought in, so WhatsApp provides a free interface to keep up communications.
