I text occasionally, most often to/from my kids, for the same reason congodwarf mentioned. It’s not as big an interruption as a phone call. I can tell the person what I want to, they can reply whenever they can.
The big text market is for kids. Maybe because they can text in school without getting in trouble. At least between classes, sometimes during classes. My son and his friends can use thousands of messages a month. Sounds like a lot, but think of each text message as a sentence in a conversation; often several conversations going on at one time. 6000 text messages a month is 200 a day, 100 sent, 100 received. Often, a message is one letter - 'k?
When I told my son he was texting too much, he mentioned a girl in his school had used 23,000 text messages one month. I thought that was unlikely, but a blog I ran across mentioned 14,000 in one month by one user, 35,000 by another user; and mentions as a record 182,689 messages in one month, by an adult male - one message every 15 seconds.
I have a feeling those text messages would make for extremely dull reading.
Some people use text messages as a means of communication/control among automated systems, so maybe that’s where the 180,000 figure comes from. Unlikely to explain the school girl’s 23,000 though, I wouldn’t have thought.
For those who haven’t seen text messages, here’s a couple typical ones; one from my kid:
“Or ill just cal ma n tell her 2 call u.”
Another from a girl friend who had a stomach ache:
“How tha chinese food - get queeze thinkn of food”
Pretty bad huh? And the GF can’t spell, but oh well, these are just quick one-use messages. The less characters in the message, the less of a pain it is to enter on a number pad. And punctuation is even more difficult, as evidenced by the lack thereof. But text messages don’t exactly promote good English usage. If you’re having an extended text message conversation, a lot of messages are just going to be “okay”, or “lol” or whatever.
I am over 30, hate text messaging, and do it as little as possible. But I have a teenage sister who loves texting and does it as much or more than actual phone calls, and I believe this is the norm among the younger crowd. Several of her friends have told me they view texting as a way to send quick, informal messages. According to them, a phone call disrupts whatever you’re doing since you need to stop and pay attention to the other person. A quick text can be ignored upon receipt and answered at leisure.
On my Iphone, unlimited texting is included in the data plan. On my Sprint phone, I pay $99 for unlimited everything, but if I didn’t do that, it would cost $10/month for unlimited texts…vs .25 for each one individually.
I find them most useful when you need to communicate but can’t talk–in a club or bar, at the gym and you don’t want to stop and have a conversation but need to communicate, at work in an office with coworkers around, in a meeting, or to do a blast message to several people at once.
also–if you are talking to someone who is giving you info that you need to save, it’s often easier to have them hang up and text you the info(phone numbers, directions, shopping lists, plans, etc)