A 13 year old California girl recently sent 14,528 text messages in one month. This must be one of the warning signs of the either the Four Horsemen, the End of Days, or just plain flushing of society down the crapper.
If you were this kids parent, what would be your reaction?
Do you think this kid needs badly to get a life? A real life?
No. I’ve never understood why text-only communication is seen as intrinsically worse or less real than other forms of social interaction.
I never understood the need for so much communication.
I have been using my phone for 5 years and i havent crossed 3000 messages yet.
This kid probably needs a computer IMHO.
Yeah, it’s just a different form of obsessiveness, and that’s been around since time immemorial. One statistical outlier does not an apocalypse make.
On the other hand, that works out to a text every three minutes, 24/7. Damn.
I’m pretty sure it’s a sign of a 13 year old with no self-restraint. In other words… hardly worthy of notice.
If I were her parent, I’d tell her to lay off the texting during school hours or her phone is going away. Unless, of course, my plan didn’t include unlimited texting, in which case I’d be giving her the bad news about her college fund.
And everyone should have a life, otherwise they wind up worrying about the downfall of society at the hands of LOLing tweens.
Yeah, I’d be mostly concerned with all the texting at school. But, realistically speaking, if her grades weren’t suffering, she was getting enough sleep and she wasn’t displaying signs of compulsion around it, I’d probably just roll my eyes and leave it be.
(I mean, it seems obvious her personal relationships aren’t suffering…)
Can’t be a sign. Not divisible by 666. However, 30 messages per hour (counting off 8 hours for sleep)… did she run DOS attacks on enemy cell phones or something ? 
I just hope she doesn’t grow up to be one of those people who insist on texting and driving at the same time. I mean, that guy just crashed a friggin’ train because he was busy texting. A TRAIN!
I was talking with my 16 year old cousin a few months back at a family gathering, and he would occasionally pull out his phone, glance at it, and put it back, all while continuing to talk or listen.
He did this about 20 times in ten minutes, and finally curiosity got the better of me, so I asked what he was doing…
Talking to his girlfriend. He would hold the cell phone in his pocket and tap out a message with his thumb, then pull it out, glance at the reply, and type his response.
Never gave any indication to me other than the periodic glances at the phone(and they were quick glances… 1s max), never missed anything I said or lost his train of thought. He said he kept it in his pocket because it bothered people, and I’m 99% sure he wanted to stick an ‘older’ in their before people.
This next generation scares me.
What we have here is an electronic motormouth.
The decisive question is whether her inclination[sup]1[/sup] to run off at the index finger impairs functioning. If she can still manage her responsibilities (school, clean her room, etc.) and normal activities (eating, sleeping), then there is probably no problem - one just needs to wait for this “phase” to pass. If not, then restrictive measures need to be taken.
Course, if her plan has a per-message charge, then her father has already atomized her phone with a hammer. . . .
In a way it’s kinda cool, though. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t parallel process that well myself.
Surely this must include messages sent to multiple recipients, or else it’d be nearly physically impossible to do this without actually trying to set a record.
Think of a given text message as the equivalent of a spoken word, clause or sentence. If one has a preference for text as communication over voice (and there are many advantages including the assymmetry of it and the ability to carry on simulataneous individual conversations with multiple other remote parties), I don’t find that number surprising.
I am a geezer and would much rather text than speak. Texting enforces brevity. It’s asynchronous. I can reply at my leisure–5 seconds or 5 hours. It’s silent. It enables multi-tasking. On and on.
A witless teenager is a witless teenager; text diarrhea seems less invasive to the public to me than verbal diarrhea. I am in favor of promoting it for the teenage crowd. Particularly if it diminishes their cacophony. (Unfortunately, sometimes the verbal diarrhea simply continues unabated while simultaneously texting…)
I totally never got the appeal of texting as a conversational tool. And I’m someone who has spent many hours talking to people in a text format on a computer.
I’m not against texting for what it might be useful for - a quick text to someone to inform them of something when it’d be inconvenient for either party to make a phone call - but the conversational “hey, how are you?” type texts when both parties are FULLY CAPABLE OF SIMPLY CALLING THE OTHER PARTY WITH THE PHONE IN THEIR HANDS are obnoxious.
Is it just because it’s new and gimmicky? I got my first 2400 baud modem back in like 1993. I remember I had a friend from school who also had one. A few times we’d connect through a terminal program and type to each other - “Dude! This is so cool! We’re communicating through a computer!” - but it’s 2009. That sort of communication has been common for decades. There can’t be enough novelty to sustain irritating, slow communication on tiny keyboards, can there be? And I was 12 when I was fascinated with the novelty of this text communication - plenty of adults engage in the same behavior.
Bizarre.
And when people who can’t do it that well do it, it gets rather annoying, almost insulting, to the person they’re with. I recall one visit my SIL made here where she hardly put her phone down the entire time (she was talking to her then-ex, now-husband). We didn’t say anything, but we were not thrilled, especially considering we don’t see her that much.
I’ve never understood the love of texting some people have (I say this as someone who spends way too much time online, including a period where I IMed my BF almost constantly). It’s like they’re not focused on what’s going on around them–and as mentioned above, it’s kind of insulting to the people they’re supposedly interacting with IRL.
I hate the phone. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. Text messages are WAY less intrusive than phone calls, and I’d find calling me, when it’s just as easy and far more respectful of my time to send a text, really obnoxious.
I’m not a teenager and I absolutely agree with this.
I also don’t like voicemails in the business world. Just send me an email that I can read. If you call me or leave me a voicemail, I have to take notes of the important parts of your rambling. However for email, most people can’t type very fast so it forces them to get to the point – and as a bonus, no dictation for me.
Salespeople are the worst. They overestimate their toastmaster skills to persuade my buying decision. My response is always the same, “give me some literature, white papers, etc that I can review and research.” No, I really don’t want to sit down with you or talk to you on the phone for an hour about my “needs” and your “solutions.”
Voice is fine for family, friends, and fart jokes that need realtime delivery. For business, please use email.
Make that SeniorBeef? 
Texting for youngsters, at least, is neither new nor gimmicky. It’s just a natural part of their link to their environment.
Nor is it “instead of” (other) conversation; it’s “in addition to.”
It’s fast. It is vastly easier than a phone call, which essentially requires full attention of both parties, along with a very annoying handshake process of ringing and answering for every component being discussed. (Ring ring…hello…are you almost here…great…goobye… Ring ring…hello…did you get the milk…great…goodbye Ring ring…hello…can you pick up some olive oil also…great…goodbye – you get the idea).
Your conversation paradigm is for a series of specific information exchanges which can be completed at a given moment in time and can take precedence over all else while the “conversation” is being undertaken.
That’s not what typical texting is, for youngsters or geezers.
You might be amused to read about the establishment reaction when telephones were invented.
I hate phones of any sort… tools of the devil they are. Then again, I’ve got no mates.
Bring back carrier pigeons!
I guess, if being 27 and being technically savvy voer 15 years makes me too old to be in the loop.
But there are plenty of people my age that engage in the same conversational texting behavior. Like I said - there are lots of legitimate little uses for it when it’s less hassle than a phone call - but I see people having casual conversations over it, while it occupies most of their attention - when it would be far more appropriate to simply call each other and have the same conversation.