I would too. You know when you’re walking down the sidewalk toward the same person all the way and you don’t know where to look and it’s weird? Pull out cell phone and look busy.
I’m an introvert but I send texts pretty often. My plan allows for 400 text messages a month which I have gone over once.
Part of my usage comes from my huge family. I have siblings in Redondo Beach California, North Carolina, Columbus OH, Washington DC, and Cincinnati OH. My high school friends, many of whom I am still close to, are even more wide-flung than my siblings with several overseas. Figuring out different time zones and schedules for which to call is a huge pain, especially for those that travel around a lot. My father is in a different state about once a week and a different country at least twice a year (and he will sometimes leave on very short notice). A phone call is, generally, more obtrusive than a text and I don’t particularly like talking on the phone because I have ADD and distract easily.
I find that having a cell phone with texting features is like a portable AIM. I particularly like texting because it is easier to screen when I am not in the mood to talk to another person. If they call, I have to wait for the voice mail and then listen to it. If they text, I can instantly know what they wish to talk about and either text back, call back, or go back to whatever else I am doing.
I’ve noticed that I am more connected to and have a closer relationship with siblings of mine who get on aim a lot or have the ability to send texts back and forth with me. None of us in the family really enjoy talking on the phone and we are only all together around Christmas time. Even if I was a person who enjoyed talking on the phone a lot, the different time zones and schedules make it annoying to try to arrange a time to call. What is best for my brother might be while I am in class. The best time for me to chat is generally when one of my sisters is getting ready for bed. I can send a text while on the bus, waiting in line, in a boring class, etc.
As for what I talk to them about, I talk to them about things I would discuss if I was there in person. I ask my older brother how he enjoyed his recent hiking trip and he sends me recipes he loves. I discuss a sister’s recent TV appearance and we chat about our favorite shows. I compliment another brother on his new job and discuss what he did over the summer. I ask another the date he starts college in the fall and to give me his new address and I give him tips for a first year. I ask my dad when his business will take him to near where I live and try to arrange dinner plans. My mom sends me updates on her genealogical research or mini-reviews of books she’s just read.
As for local friends, I’ll send a text to a bunch asking if they want to see a particular movie with me at a certain time. People will text me to invite me to various clubs or parties or confirm plans already made. The clubs and groups that I am part of will often send out texts to organize events. I think it would be impossible to organize 20+ people to see a movie together within a week without the use of cell phones.
I also love the picture taking capability of phones and I love to send texts with photos. I recently took a picture of our family dog being especially cute and I sent it to most of my siblings and a few of my friends. Many of them, like myself, hadn’t seen him for at least half a year and I got quite a few delighted responses and many requests to pet him extra for them.
I like to be able to talk to almost anyone at nearly any time -if I choose to do so-. When I go on vacation I normally take my cell phone but leave it off expect for emergencies. It’s a whole network of people that I can connect to or ignore whenever I feel like it. I don’t understand the people who feel that having a cell phone would be a yoke or a hindrance. You can turn it off or on silent when you don’t feel like being socialable.
I’m with the OP. I do not understand having that much to say to anyone.
I use a prepaid, pay by the minute plan in which the minimum is that you put 20 bucks on it every three months. I have never come close to using all of it and I’ve sent exactly one text message in my life. (it was in response to a text) Now when I’m at home sitting on the computer, I do use IM quite a bit. But even then I’ll leave it off for long stretches when I just don’t want to be bothered.
Actually for me that is exactly what it is. When I am walking down the street to get to the train in certian parts of the city I can either be hit on by skeevy men and listen to homeless people beg me for money or I can flip open my phone and pretend that I am on the receiving end of a conversation. Then bcause I am not really talking to anyone I am not distracted from the things around me so it isn’t as if I am being less safe but I also look distracted enough to keep the catcalls and the beggars at bay.
And often times when I am in line someplace or on the Metro North or whatever I will call my family and friends to talk to them and see what they are doing, tell them what is going on in my life, etc. That down time when I am effectively not doing anything (even though grocery shopping or going to work is technically doing something) frees up my time later so that I can clean, watch a movie, sleep, etc. without having to worry that my mom will call and interrupt me because I haven’t spoken to her in 4 days and she is worried. So other people who I see in my daily life probably think of me as someone who spends a lot of time on the phone, but I hardly spend any time on the phone at all when I am at home. Almost all of my phone minutes are used in public. I don’t text, but I understand people who do.
As for what I talk about, it’s the same stuff anyone else talks to their family and friends about.
“How was the wedding?”
“How are things at work?”
“You won’t believe what happened to me yesterday!”
“When is your next day off work?”
“You want to go to dinner tonight?”
I think the question is: Do your messages actually have any content?
I’m a busy guy. I do a lot of stuff. I go to work, I do adventure sports, I watch great movies, go to cultural events… and there is no way in hell I would have enough to say to fill up the minutes of some cellphone plans.
Sure, I could talk and fill up that time (maybe, if I wasn’t too busy to pick up the phone), but I wouldn’t have anything meaningful to say after awhile, unless I got into the minutae that no one wants to hear about, like “Yeah, my toenail clippers really made a loud ‘click’ sound just now.” I’d be talking for the sake of talking.
I have a co-worker who talks on her cell, IMs, and emails all day. I think after awahile it’s “meta-messaging” because there is a point where her day has been nothing but messaging so she must start messaging people to tell them that she’s messaged people.
I’m not super outgoing, nor do I need to talk to people a lot, but I love, love, love my cell phone and text messaging for these reasons:
Cell phone:
- Great for emergencies, e.g. car accident: I can call 911, the insurance company, tow truck, and my SO without having to find a phone.
- Great for when things come up: “Hey, honey, I just remembered we are out of milk and I’m stopping off at the store on my way home. Do we need anything else?”
- Great for coordinating with people at the last minute: “I’m running 20 minutes late because there was an accident on Hwy 40. Go ahead and order appetizers and I’ll be there soon” or “Hi. We were supposed to meet here, but the road is blocked off – can we meet instead at this intersection?”
- Great for keeping in touch with distant relatives, thanks to “free” minutes after 7 pm and on weekends.
Texting:
- Great when it’s necessary to communicate quickly but subtly: e.g. my SO is out of town on business, stuck in meetings all day, and can’t answer the phone – and on my end the HVAC repair guy has just offered two options to fix a problem – so, I text her a message and we discuss which is best without obviously interrupting her meeting.
- Great for making plans without spending a lot of time chatting or leaving voice messages: e.g. texting multiple friends about getting together for dinner that evening. (Not that I don’t want to chat with them, but I would prefer to save it until dinner time and not waste time at work.)
All these sorts of things add up to quite a few cell phone minutes each month, but save quite a few hassles and many minutes in other ways. It’s a quality of life thing.
I’m not a big phone talker–never liked talking on the phone–but I absolutely love text-messaging. I text just about everybody I know on a regular basis; I go through about 2000 sent-and-received text messages a month.
FTR, I always receive more text messages than I send, by about 20%. If that’s relevant.
As for what I’m saying…
I’m telling my boyfriend how work is going, and asking him how work is going, and planning our time together, and telling him about the funny thing that just happened, or just telling him I love him or I miss him or whatever.
I’m telling my friends pretty much the same things.
I’m telling my boss something about work that I can’t say out loud in front of customers. I’m reminding him we’re out of something. I’m letting him know I’ve locked the doors and I’m about to leave.
I’m texting my friend across the bar to tell them to come save me from the random troll that won’t stop talking to me.
I’m letting all my friends know where I’m at, if they’d like to join me.
I’m letting my mother know I’ll call her later when I’m off work.
I’m reminding my co-workers about something work-related.
I’m telling my girlfriends I had a great time and I got home safely and we should do it again soon.
I’m bored at work and I’m sending random texts to friends to pass the time. Or I’m replying to theirs when they do the same.
Does that clarify things?
Because you can’t pop your computer in your pocket and continue your IMs at work.
I do. No, I really do. My husband and I text all day long, and it’s entertaining.
Here are my last five outgoing texts:
(to several friends) “Camping is a go, I rescheduled my surgery for the next week”
(to a co worker) “Are you cooking anything this week that could benefit from some hot peppers?”
(to my husband in response to him thanking me for driving up to his work to have lunch with him) “Of course! I’m always up for a lunch date with -cutesy nickname-”
(to a married couple) " Happy anniversary, guys! See you Friday!"
(to hubby) “Alright, I’m out the door!”
All stuff that doesn’t require an actual phone call.
I’m not big on talking on the phone. Texting is more convienient.
This type of example from you and others is enlightening. Every single sentence except for the “Camping is a go.” is completely foreign to me when it comes to something you would get motivated enough to seek out a communications device, prepare it, and send it to someone. That isn’t belittling you and what you do. I am honestly interested in how and why people communicate in their personal lives and how some spend so much time doing it. I am much more of a content person and even the Monday Morning Posts in MPSIMS leaves me scratching my head.
I am known for the shear number of odd and interesting stories I have because my life has been interesting (lots of it very crappy but still interesting). It would never occur to me to repeat one of them to the same person more than once and hardly any of them take more than 2 - 3 minutes.
I know that I am an extreme case. I partially fulfilled my dream of being a hermit by living in a Vermont farm house on 40 acres by myself with no phone or mailing address for 4 months in 1996. The only reason I changed the plan wasn’t because I didn’t love it. I just ran out of the meager amount of money I had at the time and had to move to Boston to support myself again. My father calls me approximately every two months for literally about less than two minutes at a time. Rumor in the family says that he is getting another divorce and yet both of us neglected to touch on this subject at all during the last two calls and I still don’t know if it is true or even where he is living if he got kicked out of the house.
There are extremes on both sides of the issue and I am interested in hearing about both perspectives. My mother is a professional world speaker and author who travels most of the time. She has started to compensate by starting e-mail lists (she has several) to me, my two brothers, and my two stepbrothers that got a little too generic and impersonal for my tastes especially when she seemed to lump her real children with her stepchildren (who I have always liked a lot). I asked to be removed from all of her e-mail lists because I thought the idea was mildly insulting and actually call every month or so for 5 minutes and talk about what is really important.
I’ve got a BlackBerry. I reply to emails when they come in. I reply to text messages with phone calls.
I’m an infrequent cell phone user, older, glad to have it for neccessary communication, not at all afraid of technology. Don’t use it that much.
But, in the quote above, I do wonder about the future of telling a story, with good thought and nuance. I was raised by a family that relished being able to tell the tales of the day’s experiences, especially with humor, and laugh at it all together. I’m not sure that the experience of yakking together all day would diminish that, perhaps, it would be: “Oh, Yeah, That!” as if you had been next to the person all day. Yet, the ability to tell a story with coherence, buildup, and a nice kicker end was valued .
Is the constant communication making the well-thought out story, in the oral family sense, a thing of the past? Or, does it add to the end of the day by everyone, by being in touch, getting together and building on the day’s repartee? I can see it going in the latter direction, but no experience with that sort of communication. (I do smell an exciting new grant proposal for sociologists, though, absolutely!)
I have a lot of friends in other countries. When it’s not convenient to IM them, texting is a cheap and portable way to have conversations with them when you have some downtime.
To be honest I think so many people multi task in today’s society that it’s just another way of cutting down time to get everything that they need/want to do done.
I’m with Shagnasty on this one. It’s not about the technology. It’s about the need for communication in that constant a manner.
I have, when I was unemployed and living alone, gone for WEEKS without speaking more than “Hello”, “Thank you” or “Sorry”. I don’t use IMs. I have a cell phone, but it’s never on unless supervenusfreak is using it (he calls for his mom’s van pickup when they’re out to a doctor’s appointment). I communicate with my friends via LiveJournal, I communicate on here, and I have to communicate at work and with the folks I live with, but I do that either via email or face-to-face.
I’ve lived for weeks without answering the phone directly. I’d let the machine pick it up and call people I had to or wanted to talk to back. I’ve never owned a beeper and as I said, I rarely use my cellphone. I don’t WANT to be available. I even avoid grouping or joining a guild in World of Warcraft because the obligation to be available on someone else’s schedule disgruntles me.
I do NOT understand people who actually desire that constant connection. I’m not criticizing people like that, I’m just saying that it’s like some weird tradition of some alien civilization to me.
I don’t understand it either.
I was wonderinng about the people who say: “Well, it passes the tme when I’m waiting for the bus.” What? You can’t be alone with your own thoughts? I know grocery shopping isn’t rivetingly interesting, but I don’t need to have my buddy entertain me by telling me he’s trimming his hedge any more than he needs me to entertain him by telling him I can’t find rice noodles on the shelves.
And when I’m at work, I don’t IM my fiancee all day, because, franlky, I’m working. We can discuss our plans later and I didn’t need to know rightthatsecond what she had for lunch and she doesn’t need to know rightnowcan’twait if I have the time to pick up some lentils on the way home.
We might exchange messages at the very end of the day, or she’ll pick up lentls herself if we need them.
I’ve got some insane amount of free minutes and texts that I couldn’t possibly ever use in a month, but as a previous poster says it frees me from worrying about things like being stuck on hold or how to communicate with someone in 29.9 seconds lest I roll over into “having to pay for the call” territory.
Besides being able to communicate short messages that aren’t necessarily deserving of a phone call - “I’ve paid the rent, there’s enough money left in the account to get the groceries if you want to go to the supermarket”, for example- but it’s also useful for conversations you don’t want to share with everyone on the bus/train/ferry/wherever you are, either for reasons of privacy, good taste, or not violating local obscenity laws. 
jayjay, Swallowed My Cellphone, Shagnasty, and others, you’ve pretty much summed up my and my husband’s attitudes towards communication devices. I’ll use them for my convenience (asking my husband to pick up milk on the way home when we’re out and I need it), but just talking or IMing for the sake of communicating? Just don’t see the need. After reading this thread, I’m thinking it’s less generational and more just another differentiating characteristic of human beings, like introvert and extrovert. Communicados and non-communicados? I’ll never understand people who can’t seem to have a thought that doesn’t have to be told to someone else, and they’ll probably never understand us, with our lack of desire to communicate constantly.
Who says they’re paying for it? I have those kinds of conversations, but typically with people like my boyfriend or my mom… who are on the same network as I am and so those calls are free. Me? I don’t see why I should AVOID carrying on small talk with my boyfriend while I’m grocery shopping or something, if we both enjoy it. I’m not one of those people who talks at a shout when on the cell phone, and it’s not like I’m discussing bowel movements or something that will gross out the people around me. If I were walking around the grocery store WITH my boyfriend should we then also maintain strict silence except to say what is completely essential? If the difference is only that people don’t like hearing only one side of a conversation, then they can bite me–my conversation isn’t their business and they have no right being annoyed that they can’t listen in to both sides of it.
As of a month ago I now live with my boyfriend and this makes a huge difference… but for the past 3 years we’ve lived many states apart and only saw each other once every month or two. The only conversations we had with each other were over the phone. Similarly, my mom lives thousands of miles away from me. In fact, for the last several years, I haven’t really had friends or family within 600 miles of where I lived. Phone calls/emails pretty much are the only way I keep in contact with people since I can’t see them in person without buying a plane ticket.
As for texting, I find it extremely convenient. It’s a good way to ask a quick question or send a quick note to someone without disturbing them (like if you know they’re at work or in class or something, they can read it and respond whenever they get a convenient moment) and it’s also a good way to have something written down. If I’m on the phone with my mom and she wants to tell me an address or a phone number or a name, I’ll tell her to text it to me when she gets off the phone. This is because chances are even if I can find a pen and something to write on, I’ll lose it before I need it anyway. If it’s safely stored in my phone then I don’t have to worry about keeping track of it. For the same reason, I frequently send text messages from my phone to my email address to remind myself of things I need to do. In the past I used to write myself notes and put them in my purse. Then four months later I’d find some little crumpled up wad of paper in the bottom of my purse with my note on it and whatever it was I was supposed to do, I’m now too late for.
I also use text messaging to send little notes to my boyfriend to let him know I’m thinking about him. I know it makes me smile to get a quick “I love you” out of the blue on my phone.
I don’t understand the big mystery here. I mean if you aren’t the kind of person who does these things, fine… but it almost comes across as insulting to express such shock and amazement that other people are. People can get so snobby about their non-use of cell phones… like they’re a better person for not using them or something. I don’t get it. People are different. They enjoy different things. Why is that so incomprehensible?