Cell phones. It seems like everyone, especially every teenager, has one. A drive by the local high school right when school lets out will find nearly every student with a phone up to their ear. I usually exclaim to the kids, “Quick! Hold something up to your ear so it looks like you’re talking on the phone.”
Research has found that phone calls are getting shorter and texting is becoming more popular.
The nation’s 270 million cell phone subscribers each sent out an average of 407 text messages in December 2008, according to government statistics released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.
Since I rarely use text messaging, someone is sending out a lot more than 407 text messages a month.
. . . research found the average teen currently sends more than 2,000 text messages per month. About two-thirds of all teens use text messaging, mostly due to its simplicity as well as the privacy of being able to communicate without being overheard.
Two thousand messages a month?! That’s 67 messages a day. Let’s assume that the average teen spends 16 hours a day either sleeping or in school. That leaves eight hours for other things like texting. That would mean the teen would send approximately eight text messages every hour or one message every 7.5 minutes. How can you get anything done, like homework, if you’re being distracted by all of these text messages? If all these messages are being sent, that means someone is receiving them.
In the age of the Internet, email, texting, and tweeting is it really that important to know what our friends are doing every moment of the day? Why have we found it necessary to broadcast our “status” to everyone we know–and in some cases people we don’t know? This may be the Information Age, but we seem to be sacrificing quality for quantity.
