Slashdot Mirror
Has Texting Replaced Talking For Teens?
Hugh Pickens writes "Sue Shellenbarger has an interesting essay in the WSJ where she talks about the 2,000 incoming text messages her son racks up every month — more than 60 two-way communications via text message every day — and her surprise that 2,000 monthly text messages is about average for today's teenagers. 'I have seen my son suffer no apparent ill effects (except a sore thumb now and then), and he reaps a big benefit, of easy, continuing contact with many friends,' writes Shellenbarger. 'Also, the time he spends texting replaces the hours teens used to spend on the phone; both my kids dislike talking on the phone, and say they really don't need to do so to stay in touch with friends and family.' But does texting make today's kids stupid, as Mark Bauerlein writes in his book ' The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future? 'I don't think so. It may make them annoying, when they try to text and talk to you at the same time,' writes Shellenbarger, adding, 'I have found him more engaged and easier to communicate with from afar, because he is constantly available via text message and responds with a faithfulness and speed that any mother would find reassuring.'"
I was part of the "teenager" definition just few years ago and I believe I sent... 3 SMS in my whole life. Most of my friends also barely sent a handful, the worst maybe sent 10 per day. 2000 is just insane.
Technology changes. Cultures change to adopt the new technologies. A few years ago the worry was that instant messenger programs would make people dumb. Now its text messaging. There's no indication that any of this is making anyone substantially stupider. The ignorance of general history, science and geography discussed in the Newsweek article aren't new things. It isn't like we were all history buff 30 years ago and now are all ignorant.
Wow... Americans took an entire decade on what the rest of the world has already been doing...
NOW its news...
Give me a freaken break!
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Texting is popular because it is an extremely efficient method to keep in touch. It's half-duplex, so both parties don't have to be available at the same time. Text messages are brief and quickly digestible, unlike email. One point the story doesn't address is the idea of how many text messages constitute a conversation. Sure, sometimes it's a single message, but often you might find that over the course of an hour you have exchanged more than a dozen messages with the same friend. Given that, I don't think 60 messages a day for a teenager is all that high. It means they have somewhere between two to four friends. And unlike a phone call, you can actually do homework between messages.
I'm getting REALLY REALLY sick of reading these kinds of reports. Texting is not going to cause the end of civilization or throw us into a depraved existance where nobody sees anyone IRL anymore, and we all are addicted to our technology. This is the baby boomers taking Huxley a bit too seriously. Here's some reality for you: Most of my friends text. Some don't. Of the ones that do, they have a much more active social life and get out of the house a lot more often than those who don't. Texting, and e-mail, and instant messages, is a way for us to all stay in touch with one another in a highly kinetic world where plans are made and broken again in minutes as things change.
Texting doesn't "replace" talking -- it enables it! Look at your average baby boomer: They usually have less than 5 friends, most of them are coworkers, and if they are married their spouse provides most of the social interaction they're going to get. And they rot away watching TV or with hobbies like gardening. On the flip, you've got our generation where having forty friends on facebook is considered average. I see a friend at least once or twice a day. I get more social interaction in the flesh on an average day that my baby boomer parents and aunts and uncles get in a week, sometimes a month! And texting, email, and instant messaging make all of it possible. How else could we connect with each other in an information-rich world where things are moving so fast and we are all so mobile all the time?
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"... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number."
-- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"
People who say that successive generations are getting dumber are really just admitting the ignorance they have of the world.
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As a small business owner I have noticed that those "teens" turn in to my employees and think it's ok to text while working and then expect to get "good jobs" for showing up on time to work. In fact; I have a 17 year old girl who seems quite reasonable, say to me after showing up 20 minutes late that she thought, and I quote "I didn't think it was a big deal". This kind of thinking is not isolated, to her , it is very common in this age range of employees.
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I took a quick look at that book on a store shelf once, and it smells of a gigantic "get off my lawn" diatribe.
First off, the cover comes off as silly. While I get the ironic imagery of Japaneese robots reenacting the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, it also lacks appreciation for the details for the themes explored in Gundam.
More to the point, there was never some intellectual golden age, during the author's lifetime or otherwise, where people had a broad appreciation for literature, art, and history. A review of the book on Amazon gives many specific examples of this generation being quite a bit smarter than Bauerlein's own generation.
Not a typewriter
Yeah god forbid.
Look I agree that texting is not making anyone less intelligent but texting is a watered down form of social interaction. A friend on facebook most of the time is not a real friend. The real threat is creating social interaction without the social connection. Where we reduce people to objects that we interact with rather than someone who lives and breathes.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I think old people are concerned about a perceived lack of self-disciplined development, a meme that seems to have left the modern generation.
That's so much bullsh*t it's not even funny. No, what they're concerned about is that they don't understand that our generation doesn't need formal leadership in order to organize into groups and tackle problems. You give a group of 18-25ers a problem and say "fix it", and you'll have it fixed in short order. The older generation believes a stricter social hierarchy as necessary to production. Our generation doesn't. So when we attack a problem as we do -- by pulling in our friends, our coworkers, and asking a lot of questions, they view it as a lack of "self-discipline". And they bitch about people being 10 minutes late to their shift -- and think that's more important than the fact that they're doing about twenty different jobs, holding six conversations at once on several different mediums at the same time and doing it well.
The older generation(s) do not understand that our ways of social interaction require new thinking about the environment and social structures we've long assumed to be natural and unchanging. We're living in an accelerated world -- we can't afford to take time out from this to elect a leader, attend management meetings, and keep to a strict timetable... Our generation has an excellent strength: Balancing many often competing objectives while working in a very socially fluid environment. Or put another way: We are Borg.
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I was part of the "teenager" definition just few years ago and I believe I sent... 3 SMS in my whole life. Most of my friends also barely sent a handful, the worst maybe sent 10 per day. 2000 is just insane.
Your comparing 10 a day to 2000 a month.
In case they can't do it themselves:
10 Text Messages / day * 30.5 day/mo = 305 Text Messages / Month
Compared to 2000 / month is less than an order of magnitude. However approaching 100 per day does seem high, until you consider that they're messaging with multiple friends and unlike most email, texting is usually sentences back and forth (a conversation) instead of larger blocks of thoughts at a time.
The part that seems most ridiculous for this is that carriers charge a default rate of $.25 per message if you don't have some kind of plan. Can you imagine the kids parent's freaking over a $500 phone bill for text messages.
I think there's a huge attraction for young people to communicate without prying ears. I can remember at home using the wired landline and having to stay in one area to have a conversation that was overheard by others. Back then, there were no text messages, emails, instant messages or private lines. Today it's much easier to communicate and share information. It's understood that parents should be involved to some degree in what their children are up to, but part of growing is the cycle of having trust extended and earned. At one point, barring any other extinuating circumstances (pending discipline, recent inapproprate behavior, neglect of responsibility, loss of privledges) kids should have an opportunity to use the trust they have earned while balancing their other obligations. With that said, we all know the upsides to text messages versus phone conversation. It's convenient, you can abbreviate and use symbols, send attchments, communicate silently and have contacts that are in various geographical locations worldwide. I remember speaking in code on the phone back in the day to convey some kid-important message to a friend. We know kids want to talk about what they want to talk about and feel comforatable doing it, why force them to announce it within earshot?
What makes teens stupid these days certainly isn't texting; it is the lousy below standard education, TV brainwashing, and the "American dream" house, that sits on a lot 100 miles away from any museum, cultural center and interaction with day-to-day events.
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I agree, most American's are substantially dumber now than the rest of the world. They have poorer reading skills, poorer vocabulary and in most cases have very poor reasoning skills.
On the other side I'm sure it's not the texting or the instant messaging. It's just a poor education system, it's probably 2 generations ago or so that American's were more up on science and technology and geography etc. But this is yet another example of a country that is becoming an empire in the wrong way.
America used to discover and make the best products, now they sit and wait for poor quality and design from China and the other countries that America exploits for cheap labour.
You wonder why your jobs are leaving, but can't make the effort to buy the products still made in America.
I sat around recently having an engaging conversation with older cousins while a group of younger cousins sat there watching us and not saying a peep. We were TV. They laughed, reacted some times but didn't engage. It was kinda sad.
Texting is to writing as grunting is to speaking, as a mud hut is to the Taipei tower.
Most text messages are one or two sentences, sometimes with only a few words, the average text is probably under 10 words in length. Then when you consider 2000 a month is 66 per day, this kid is managing less than 600 words per day by text message. Thats peanuts. What's that really, two or three emails, slashdot rants, one phone conversation?
I really think there is no plausible basis to the assumption texting is replacing conversation as the prosetlyising of a generation of paranoid parents implies.
I think text messaging fills a gap, a need not previously met. It enables communication where otherwise we'd have kept our thoughts to ourselves or just plain been out of contactable reach:
It fits where you want to send a few thoughts, but there isn't really enough reason to waste someones time in a full conversation or you'd otherwise be out of contact.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I seem to remember Gen X kids being accused of the same things when we were teenagers (lazy, out of touch, stupid, etc). Guess what? The boomers were accused of the same thing by their parents.
Frankly, I think the kids coming up nowadays are a lot more sane about some stuff (drugs, for example) than we were. Less race riots in schools, too.
But come on, when did Slashdot become overrun with geezers? You pick a few examples and apply a broad brush to an entire generation from a few selected anecdotes. If you could point to studies that show declining IQ scores, I'd be a little worried. Complaining about teens being lazy? Aristotle did that, and he was as correct then as the old farts before their time that are grousing on this story are now. Live a little, and get some perspective.
As a continuation of the above and related to this thread's subject, I would suggest that the form of your language really does matter, because it shapes the way you think. Texting limits the conceptual breadth of the language, which in turn limits its users' capacity for intelligent thought.
Texting seems to me to combine all the disadvantages of a phone call and email - immediate interruption and typing.