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.'"

Comments

And next they'll want them to get off the lawn

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:And next they'll want them to get off the lawn

[girlintraining]

I like to see articles that spread the idea of cultural change being positive.

"Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change." -- Students for Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement, June 15, 1962

Fifty years later, this same generation now looks fearfully upon social change it once demanded... And yet I see no fault in any generation we have a memory of. Such is the nature of the human condition: We fear what we do not understand, and we're predisposed to stick with what works instead of trying something new. I can hear the voices of generations past: "Leave trying new things to the young, right? We only have so much energy... Put it towards something we know will pay off."

Re:And next they'll want them to get off the lawn

[Anonymous Coward]

. What happened in the 1950s doesn't have much (if any) relevance to our day to day lives now...

Truly, your ignorance is astounding. Take a look, for example, at modern Germany and tell me WWII does not still have a profound influence.

Re:And next they'll want them to get off the lawn

[drdrgivemethenews]

My favorite formulation of this principle:

A conservative is a [person] who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.
-- Alfred E. Wiggam

Re:And next they'll want them to get off the lawn

[Moridineas]

What happened even ten years ago now has only limited importance.

With all due respect, that's a horrendously dumb statement. If you really do mean that, I think you've just perfectly illustrated one of the issues with current generations!

Don't judge people based on their memory or caring for esoteric issues that might have affected life in the "distant" past (for people my age, that's anything more than about 30 years ago) -- they know just as many fungible facts as their older counterparts, it's just about a smaller period of time.

That's just the thing. Humans have been around a long time, we've done a lot of things, and we've thought about a lot of things. If you limit yourself to only caring about things that happened in the last decade (or as you later expand it, the last 30 years) you're missing out on the vast majority of the human experience! Art, music, literature, philosophy. If you don't care about any of those things > 30 years old, you're both ignorant and missing out (IMHO of course).

It's this exact same kind of myopic "ignore all but the present" viewpoint that makes people make the same mistakes over and over and over again. Moreover, to people who don't have such a myopic view, the myopes are just really uninteresting people by and by.

I'm in my late-20s. I'm not one to claim that certain generations are better or not, because as one historiographer wrote (roughly paraphrased) each generation is less than the one before it, the youth today are merely shadows of their parents. Everybody has ALWAYS felt the next generation is going to hell, and we've done ok so far. Or take the ancient Greeks who lamented the anemic memories of students who learned reading and writing. Etc. My concerns are more along the lines that I think that the MASSES of the facebook-texting-always in contact-always on the grid-don't have to remember ANYTHING because I can look it up instantly generations (of which I am a solid member) are prone to change society in ways I personally don't like and don't think are positive. Thus is life though.

Re:And next they'll want them to get off the lawn

[BrokenHalo]

There's no indication that any of this is making anyone substantially stupider.

This is true. But (anecdotally) a large number of people I know (no matter how intelligent) seem to have acquired an ever-decreasing attention span: people who 15 or 20 years ago used to read through 500-page texts will balk at short articles:

"tl;dr"

Likewise, those who will not read a novel if a film has been made of it - a potted version, denuded of all subtlety, is all their mentality is equipped to cope with.

I'm beginning to doubt the value of instant access to all content; it seems to me that it has a tendency to result in a smaller amount of time allocated to thought.

Re:And next they'll want them to get off the lawn

[smoker2]

As long as you can communicate intelligibly with other people, it doesn't matter what dialect, accent, medium, or slang is used. "Proper language" isn't necessary for some groups -- someone who is poor and grew up on the street has little need to read/write the Queen's english well.

If you can't communicate properly, you are limited to communicating only with those within your own group you can physically speak to. You don't have the skill to write a sensible document. And if you are poor and grew up on the street, you are going to stay there unless you can advance beyond grunts and slang.

It always amuses me how people who reject intelligent culture and identify with people of lesser ability are actually doing more to maintain the class divide than the ones who speak and write correctly. Ironic considering they claim "it doesn't matter".

Here is a real quote from a trucking website, see if you can spot the problem :

hgv lineces
hi guys im 19 and have done two yeasr in haulage one in the yard the orther van driving, i can rope and sheet no problem.i want to do my hgv at next year but havent got a clue were to start i was wondering if any can give me some pointersin the rite direction ie cost and stuff like that thanks

This guy is asking for help from people he appears to respect. How much effort went into that post ? He might claim to do better if he was writing to apply for a job, but I doubt it somehow. If you can do it, you always do it (barring typos), you don't just drop into illiteracy as if you were taking off your coat.

You might claim that because you can understand it, everything's rosy - not so. If you can't pay attention to even the most basic details in your off duty life, who is going to believe that you will suddenly start when you're on duty ? Not to mention that the employers start to think they can get away with dropping the wages because we're not worth the money.

On a larger scale I think it has to do with entropy. Recently we have had discussions on here regarding the apparent slowdown in new technology and development. From what I can see, back when education was seen as the thing to do to get on in life, people worked hard and fought to retain what they had achieved. These days, the generation who should be fighting for something are simply involved in destroying or at least disregarding what came before, just because they can't be bothered to take their hands out of their pockets. 'It doesn't matter' has become a mantra, one which I know you will live to see the error of.

Re:2000!?

[ilo.v]

I was part of the "teenager" definition just few years ago ...

Welcome to the old fart's club. Your cabana is right over here. The metamucil is complementary, but you will have to charge the Rogaine and Grecian Formula to your club credit card. Our next group outing is to the Rolling Stone's concert. Don't forget that you are responsible for packing your own oxygen tanks and diapers before boarding the group bus.

Captain Obvious

[rcolbert]

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.

Screw the old people!

[girlintraining]

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?

Re:Screw the old people!

[himitsu]

You've missed your demographic here, girlintraining. Telling the /. crowd that they anyone over 30 is wasting away watching TV or *heaven forbid* gardening isn't going to get you far.

The trouble with your attitude is that once these "new" technologies are introduced the people who grew up using them fall into a trap where the technology defines their lives. Once Facebook turns into Friendster and you have to reestablish your whole social world onto the "new" Facebook are you going to be as wide-eyed and happy talking about the "kinetic" and "information-rich" world?

/. is full of curmudgeons, eccentrics and free-thinkers and as a member of that set I resent you trying to call us obsolete just because we don't all use the flavor of the week social network you subscribe to.

Re:Screw the old people!

[LurkerXXX]

Psst, kid, let me let you in on a secret....

When the boomers were young, they had really active social lives. They talked to a lot of friends. More than 5, and ones that weren't co-workers. They used to go out all the time and party too. Kinda like you do now.

Now in a few years, you and your current friends will drift a part a bit. You will likely move different places due to different careers. You will have kids. That keeps you really busy. They will have kids. That will keep them really busy. Your job will be putting way more demands on you. Theirs will too. And guess what? The next generation of kids will have more in the flesh social interactions than you will at that time. Phones didn't save them. Texting wont' save you. That's life.

And the best part....

[AnAdventurer]

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.

Re:And the best part....

[plasmacutter]

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.

As a college graduate I have noticed that those "employers" think it's ok to pay minimum wage for graduate level jobs, then make you train your replacement in india because its just too much trouble to pay even enough to allow them to pay rent through perpetual debt.

This is not isolated to just one employer, so I figure they reap what they sow with people not giving a crap about their precious schedules.

Re:Hmmmm......

[Sebilrazen]

Sure they do, they're called mod points.

all your futures are belong to us

[Quiet_Desperation]

Right on, Sister! Fight the power! All these big daddies are just aging wannabe hepcats. They are so uncool! So square! They just don't groove to our crazy lingo, you dig? They're such drags, such freams! Our gen has it made in the shade with our omnitasking powers of metathink and nonlinear preceptrons in the temporal. I think it's time to text the droogs together for an indulgence in ultraviolence to pilot our savvy into the record, tight me? If the dudes come through with their yarbles in dobby condition, we can spend some hourage back at the crib with the old lubbilubbing.