Teens Are Texting And Tweeting All Night, And Calling It 'Vamping'
Basically, it's what teens these days do anyway: text, peruse Facebook, and watch videos on YouTube. But "vamper"s see themselves as a sort of after-hours cyber community, according the The New York Times.
Vamping, of course, refers to vampires ("Twilight," anyone?)
Like other things teens do, vamping seems to be about looking cool in front of your buddies.
"You want to seem as cool as possible so you will post something at 2 in the morning, to just be like, 'Oh, I'm part of this cool-kid group,' " a vamper told the New York Times,
Her friend then added, "My friends and I see the same thing down our newsfeeds, posts about #breakingnight, also known as #notsleepingatall and #vamping."
And while teens staying up past bedtime is nothing new, their desire to connect to others in the wee hours of the night is something professionals see as a symptom of their busy lives during the day.
"Parents think they are doing good," Danah Boyd, a scholar and senior researcher at Microsoft Research, told said to The New York Times of parents overwhelming their kids with daytime activities. "But hanging out is where young people begin to understand social dynamics. Because of the restrictions placed on them, very few interactions are unstructured until their parents go to bed." Hence, the late night festivities. Right now it seems the solution for parents might be to give their children more "hang-out" time, or lock their phones and laptops away every night. Their call.Here are some #Vamping and #Breakingnight examples we found on Twitter: