Dear Ms Samantha Taylor,

                                           After reading your article about the digital age is making teenagers uniquely shallow and the kids are unable to form meaningful relationships, I have come to a conclusion that I am not entirely sure that the points of people like Franzen and Louis C.K are entirely agreeable with.
The authors first argument is something that most people should disagree with. This is because the digital age can also bring joy and create meaningful relationships. There may still be teenagers who are like what they have stated but those teenagers can be like that because of their real social life. Most people who are uniquely shallow seem to have had a bad online social. The points these authors have stated in your article also states that kids are turning into Emoticon-addled zombies. I completely disagree with this because of the fact that firstly; they have selected a very small amount of people to conduct this social experiment on. Secondly; Most of the people who the authors happen to call ‘Emoticon-addled zombies’ are mainly of the ages 10-14. The only reason I have stated this fact is because most children nowadays are handling more technology than they should have. Most girls under the age of 13 have started to open instagram accounts and started to post selfies and their current age. I would agree that Snapchat and Instagram are two key examples of companies that need to set an age limit for sign up but social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are not only used for socialising with one another across the world or down the street, they can be used for learning as well. For example a student may have not been in school for a day and might have missed out on crucial knowledge for an exam. However this can also be a really negative thing in the world.

Today there are people like a man named Trevor Monk who are all paedophiles. Trevor Monk boasted about how he groomed girls under the age of 13 on social media. People like him tend to start talking to young girls around the age of 13 or young boys even, and they pretend to be a young boy or girl. By doing this they start to create a ’emotional bond’ with the teenager they are talking to. Young girls tend to fall victims to child predators because of how easy it is to talk to girls and pretend to be a young teenage boy just by taking a picture of a boy on the internet, and saying that’s them.

My final argument for this topic is another with Franzen’s second main statement the kids are unable to form meaningful relationships. I do disagree with this only because of personal experiences. Teenagers can find it hard to communicate with each other in real-life social events such as party’s of outings. People like me who do sometimes find it difficult to socialize in most occasions with people I do not know usually find it easier socializing with people that we do know. When it comes to teenage boys trying to socialize with girls they have never met it can be easy but again for us ‘Emoticon-addled zombies’ we do tend to struggle. That is why sites like omegle have been created to help people socialize online with strangers. I met a girl on a social media app called instagram and we have been good friends for a while and we have helped each other to socialize more by giving each other honest opinions on each others work. No-one deserves to be called a ‘Emoticon-addled zombie’ because Franzen and Clark are basing your facts off of data based on a large amount of stratified sampling and then call everyone else an ’emoticon-addled zombie’.