My high school experience was very analog. I had been word-processing most of my school papers and doing some recreational coding/hacking since I was in middle school (around 1982), but didn’t start using email until I went to college (1986), and then only sparingly until I left the country for grad school. So it was interesting to me to read the following piece, written by an author who came of age during the IM era, observing a younger sibling’s description of social media use in her peer group.

A few months ago, my fifteen-year-old sister told me that Snapchat was going to be the next Instagram. Many months before that she told me that Instagram was being used by her peers as much as Facebook. Both times I snickered.

Learning from past mistakes, I took some time over the holiday break to ask my sister many, many questions about how her and her friends are using technology. Below I’ve shared some of the more interesting observations about Instragram, Facebook, Instant Messaging, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, and FaceTime. I hope you’ll find them as informative, surprising, and humbling as I did. —Tenth Grade Tech Trends — Product Design — Medium.