The Ever Changing Teenage Tech Problem

Originally published on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

I noticed something strange the other day; during two trips through my town centre, one on the way back from the train and other whilst returning from ASDA I noticed a group of teenagers hadn't moved from a particular spot on a bench. Now this may not seem like anything unusual apart from the fact that they had seemingly been sat there for over an hour, and also appeared not to have parted from their phones.

My partner then informed me that the particular bench they were sitting on was the best place to get free Wi-Fi in the area, as there are four open connections there. This got me thinking that at the age of 22 how much the telephone has changed in the last few years. When I was 15 the thought of being able to sit on a bench and access free Internet through my phone was pretty unfathomable, and for my partner, who is 29, the thought of doing so when he was 15 would have been even more preposterous.

As my brain began to fathom the thought some more, it made me realise that in the last thirty years the technology that allows everyone to communicate has changed vastly, and that the issues for teenagers communicating with each other whilst out and about has changed rapidly as well.

Long gone are the days that your parents talk about when you had to "knock on" to see if someone's in. In fact the though of knocking someone's door not knowing whether they are in or not seems positively medieval these days. But for those who were teenagers in the 90s, thus most likely being born around 1980, the troubles that they experienced when trying to find their friends not only differ from their parents, but also greatly differ from their own children or younger siblings.

For example my partner was born in 1983, therefore the troubles he had would have been similar to others born in the early 80s. His telephone communication issues surround the phone box, which seems positively Stone Age these days, I mean I've never used a phone box in my life and there's only seven years between us. He began telling me about the problems of finding a phone box, making sure you had money to use it and the anger you would feel when you saw someone enter a pound into the aforementioned phone box. The thought of using a phone box to me seems ancient, which fills me with dread about how people feel about my teenage communication methods.

My method of teenage communication however seems a little less pre-historic as mobile phones became the norm by the late 1990s. As I was born in 1990 I was using mobile phones throughout my teens and the main issue I had was my signal cutting out, which usually resulted in dancing around like a lunatic with my arms waving above my head, trying to make my phone grab any dreg of signal that happened to be floating about. When I was 15 we also had WAP, which is an ancient form of mobile Internet only seen now in museums, but everyone knew it was rubbish so didn't really bother with mobile Internet. Besides we had MySpace and MSN to communicate through at home, my how I feel old.

This then brings me to now, I have a younger sister who's only eight years old, yet she has a mobile phone that is more advanced than mine was at the age of 18. It makes me think that by the time she is 15 the major problem when it comes to her mobile phone will be not having a 3G signal in order to Facebook her friends, tweet a whimsical yet non-informative 150 characters via Twitter or to Instagram her lunch, with the thought of actually making a phone call just passing her by. However I think this may already be happening, but as I am now clearly over the tech hill at the age of 22, it doesn't really matter.

All this said I too feel like I've been catapulted back to the Stone Age when my 3G connection cuts out, as I'm sure many of you do. But if I've never used a phone box it makes me a little sad that teenagers these days are going to have much better phones, resulting in tech traumas that I've never heard of, which quite frankly makes me a little jealous for some unknown reason. However if 3G were to cut out completely I wonder how teenagers would communicate? After all without free WI-FI that group of teenagers I saw would have just been sat on a bench, not talking to each other. Oh the joy.

NHS Services for Everyone?

Originally published on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

Recently I received a survey through the post; apparently out of all the people who live in my area I was selected at random despite the fact my partner also received one, what a coincidence. However this isn't what I'm getting at, the survey was about health and wellbeing for 2013 from the NHS, I know it just sounds like so much fun to fill in doesn't it?

Anyway after flicking through the questions there was the usual; do you smoke? Yes, do you drink? Yes, how much fruit and veg do you consume a week? As you can see it was a pretty standard set of questions. Now this is all well and good and maybe just maybe the survey will help with something, I don't know what it'll help with besides helping to waste some more precious NHS money. But as I got to the end of the survey there was the typical 'about you' section, gender, age, ethnicity you get the picture. I assume this is to help them narrow down which age groups, genders and social groups are suffering the most and which ones are experiencing a happier life, but the one question that was missing was that of sexuality.

Now before you start making assumptions that I'm someone who wants to shout from the rooftops that gay people are being ignored again, I'm not, but you can't help but wonder why this option isn't there. I mean study's have found that LGBT people are more likely to suffer from mental health issues or drink and drug abuse, and by asking this question on a more localised survey by the NHS they could find a way of tackling this, instead of leaving it to certain organisations such as Stonewall and the LGF.

Not every area in the country has somewhere that gay people can turn to for help, and some may send this survey back and be found to be severally depressed or unhappy with life who may be gay, yet this will go unnoticed. I filled out an online health and wellbeing survey a while ago specifically for LGBT people, which was put together by an LGBT organisation, just so I could help out with these statistics that so many organisations such as the NHS are missing.

However it isn't just this NHS wellbeing survey that fails to ask this question. When I was at University I applied for a job at a supermarket so I could make some extra money. Me and my friend (who happens to be a lesbian) went to get the application forms and both said there's no point applying, as we wouldn't get the job. However after noticing the equal opportunities section I made a quick joke that this was our way in, however there was once again no section asking about sexuality. I didn't get the job, because I had no experience working in a supermarket and neither would I want to be given a job simply because I am gay. But it makes me wonder how a company can call themselves an equal opportunities employer and only mention disability, race and ethnicity on an application form as if they're the only reasons why people would be discriminated against when applying for a job.

Now I may have digressed into something completely different there but the principal is still the same, does the NHS not care about the well being of LGBT people? Of course they care, but how will they know the full extent of the health and wellbeing of a social group that does suffer abuse in the areas in which they live (do you feel safe in your area was a question on the survey), and are known for having higher abuse rates if they fail to include a small section in a survey?

Maybe they just forgot, maybe they ran out of space on the paper or maybe because there are LGBT groups out there who've conducted these kinds of studies in the past they felt they didn't need to. The thing is we will never know why it wasn't on there, but the other fact is; if they continue to miss this off surveys in the future then the health and wellbeing of a vast amount of LGBT people will continue to go unknown, which could be a big problem for many.