Sore Thumbs and Texting

Ant writes "ABC News reports that text messaging, once seen as a way to send a short message without running up the expense of a cellular telephone/cell phone call, has become so popular that it poses its own public health problem: sore thumbs. This comes from a survey and warning put out by Virgin Mobile, one of the largest cellular service providers in Great Britain. Virgin reports that 93 million text messages are sent every day in the United Kingdom (U.K.). One estimate for the United States (U.S.), whose population is five times as large, is 700 million text messages a year. "

Comments

Oh come on now.

[Eightyford]

If my thumbs could survive Dr. Mario, Excite Bike, Punch Out and River City Ransom; I'm pretty sure that they can handle a few LOLs, BRBs and WTFs.

First litigation? Someone else to blame?

[us7892]

Has anyone sued the phone maker, text message service, or anyone else they can think of getting money from? Seems like that's the next story we'll see following all thse people with sore thumbs who need someone other than themselves to blame.

It's just a poll, actually. So they have sore thumbs...big deal.

Arghh bad use of statistics

[ironwill96]

I hate it when people place two statistics side by side as if they are comparable when they really aren't. It is misleading to say U.K. does "73 million messages per day" while U.S. estimate is "700 million per year". The mind tends to think, wow, the U.S. must text message a whole lot more! When, of course, this is not the case. Since, of course, one is a per year statistic and the other a per day statistic.

/rant off

Re:Arghh bad use of statistics

[wisdom_brewing]

well, 93 million a day. i apologise for being petty.

texting (sending an sms message) is much more popular in the UK and europe in general than it is in the states, mainly because initially the infrastructure was terrible, a very large proportion of messages were lost when sending abroad or to other networks, this has been resolved but people in general do not have the same sense of trust in the technology as they do in other countries.

imagine that in your first year of emailing more than half of your emails did not get through. this is looking through the eyes of a consumer, say you sent your first email in '98 and it didnt go through, what would you think of email? you might avoid it for a while, the same seems to have happened with sms in the states.

i agree entirely with your point as to the misleading figures, its appalling that someone would write that, especially considering the fact that it could be much more dramatic with the US population sending 700 million a year and the uk upwards of 30 BILLION.

and another point, virgin is nowhere near being a leading UK mobile phone company, the big four are 02, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile, with 3 doing a very good job of catching up (3 is an exclusively 3g network, i am not sure who they are owned by).

What?

[hal2814]

"once seen as a way to send a short message without running up the expense of a cellular telephone/cell phone call"

My text messages cost 10 cents per message. I'd have to talk for over 2 minutes to cost more than a text message and I can sure relay more information in that two minutes than most can in a text message and even get feedback during that time. Text messages have their uses but being cheaper isn't one of them. Besides, I thought the point of text messages was to annoy others trying to watch a movie in a movie theater.

Re:What?

[GoddessOfDeath]

In New Zealand text messages cost 20 cents, and one minute of calling costs (off peak) 49 cents or (on peak) $1.29. You must live in one of the lucky countries where calling is cheaper than texting. Plus there are many plans which give huge numbers of "free" texts, and not many "free" minutes.

CmdrTaco's wrists are killing him...

[sweetnjguy29]

....why am I almost positive that this is not from Text Messaging?