A teacher documented every notification her students received during class, and it's a startling look at how distracted teens are by their phones
- A picture posted by a teacher is making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter that shows just how often the students in the teacher's class got phone notifications during a single period.
- The picture shows a "collective record" with tallies counting up the notifications that students received during the class period, with the pings divided into categories: texts, phone calls, emails, and notifications from various social networks.
- A screengrab of the Facebook post was put on Twitter by New York Times reporter Katie Rosman.
If you thought you received a lot of notifications in a day, you haven't seen anything yet.
An experiment a teacher conducted on her students' phone use is making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter. The teacher had students in a class keep the volume up on their phones so they could hear when their devices rang with a notification. The class then made a "collective record" of all the notifications that came into students' phones during the class period, and kept track of the source of each notification.
The final result, illustrated out in rows of green tally marks, is overwhelming. Here's the post on Twitter, from New York Times reporter Katie Rosman:
While texting and Instagram unsurprisingly reign supreme, it's interesting to note how many emails these kids are getting, too.
A political science professor at Yale, Alex Coppock, responded to the tweet with a bar graph that visualizes the data and more easily shows the distribution of notifications. (We can't vouch for the accuracy of the graph, however, since it's hard to tell from the tallied-up poster the exact numbers.)
Rich Miner, the cofounder of Android, chimed in when he saw the tweet, lamenting how his creation - the operating system now on more than 2 billion monthly active devices - has played a role in the "smart-phone centric interrup driven world":
The post on Twitter - and the Facebook post the tweet references - don't indicate how old these students are, or how many students are in the class, or how long the period lasts. Nonetheless, it's a startling visualization of just how much kids and teens are glued to their phones.
