Face-to-face social interactions and confrontations are becoming scarce as technology allows teenagers and young adults to hide behind their phones and computers.

“People use text messaging as a crutch to avoid having to communicate with someone in person,” Brittany Kupferman, a junior geology major, said. “Because of this, kids today have bad interpersonal skills.”

Young adults, especially high school and college students, need direct social skills to work on group projects and assignments in the classroom.

“Any group activity requires tremendous mentoring or monitoring by a teacher,” Pam Dayton, a ninth-grade English teacher at Binghamton High School, said. Dayton has noticed her students this year interact less than in previous years.

According to Dayton, her students work well when paired up for an assignment, but they have difficulty extending those interactions to a big group.

“In essence, if someone is on his or her computer he or she is interacting with a partner,” Dayton said. “Take Facebook. If you are interacting on Facebook or MySpace you can have interactions with numerous people at a time, but in a group students develop … a ‘cooties I quit’ mindset, like the elementary type of thing.”

She explained that a third-grader who likes someone might knock a person down and say ‘cooties I quit,’ repelling the person when the kid really likes him or her.

In other words, this level of social interaction is creeping into the high school scene, suggesting that this generation has social skills on the level of young children.

“I think that people hide behind technology to avoid confrontation,” Mikel Richman, a senior psychobiology major, said. “I fought with my best friend through texts. We both live in the same house in separate rooms and we had a whole fight through texts from across the house since we were both afraid to talk to each other in person.”

According to Richman, while texting may be bad for your interpersonal skills, it can be more efficient than meeting with a friend or talking on the phone since you can multitask while you text.

“Texting certainly takes the tension out of being with another human being,” Joseph Church, an associate professor of English at Binghamton University, said. “Facebook also provides anonymity. It protects the user.”

Church said that he has a fear that people will begin to lose their human qualities and disappear into the digital.

“It saddens me a little bit, watching people walk across campus slightly bent over and texting,” he said. “They are not even on the phone, they are leaning over and texting, carefully reading and using their thumbs to send something out. Where is the human voice?”

According to Church there is one main difference between “snail mail,” phone calls and texting: time.

“With texting and instant messaging everything is really short, snappy and abbreviated. Phone calls take too much time,” he said. “We’re all desperate not to waste time.”

Church also said that human loneliness is the reason that people are reliant on technology for communication. With “friends” on Facebook, there is an immediate connection, but not one of great quality, he said.

“People are lonely and this [Facebook and texting] is a solution,” he said. “They are called friends, everyone has tons of friends, but how close are [you] with anyone?”

The direct link between interpersonal relationships and the use of technology to communicate is only a hypothesis, Dayton pointed out, and there is currently no data to back the theory up. Still, she said that she’s witnessing the effects of the trend through observation.

“Maybe I have a young group, but I truly do believe that this could be the first wave of a generation that has been impacted by the technology age,” Dayton said.