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Texting Is Destroying America
I like texting. For conveying short bits of information, it is much more convenient than having a conversation over the phone and there are numerous situations in which texting is an ideal means of communication. For example, if you’re giving someone an address or asking them to pick up milk on the way home from work, it is easier and more convenient to text than it is to call.
For someone my age I was fairly slow to adopt texting. I steadfastly refused to text at all until I bought an iPhone in 2007. Since then, I’ve come to realize texting can be a valuable medium of communication and I believe that it has generally made me more efficient person. Nevertheless, two recent experiences have led me to conclude that texting is destroying America.
The first experience was two weekends ago when I was in the (novel for me) situation of having houseguests, one of which was my friend’s 13-year-old daughter. Now, like any reasonable adult, I do my best to limit my interaction with adolescents and teenagers to the absolute minimum, so I was completely unprepared for the way texting dominates the lives of America’s youths.
The girl in question, though unobjectionable other respects, spent the entirety of the weekend (meals included) texting. While I’m generally sympathetic to the plight of a 13-year-old who is separated from her peers and forced into the company of a group of adults (and lawyers at that), I couldn’t help but notice that over the course of the weekend this girl did not have a single verbal conversation, either with the people she was around or even over the phone. The few times I tried to engage her in conversation were notable for their lack of success. The girl’s mother appreciated my efforts to engage her daughter in conversation and, somewhat apologetically, told me not to take their failure as a personal rebuke. She assured me that the girl’s verbal taciturnity is not limited to me or to adults generally. She apparently has a boyfriend with whom she communicates almost exclusively via text. I am reliably informed that this is not at all uncommon.
The second experience occurred yesterday. In the course of preparing for upcoming litigation I had to review the phone records of one of the witnesses. The records in question cover a period of two days, during which the witness was asleep for sixteen hours. Over that period of time the witness sent or received 936 text messages. This means the witness either sent or received a text approximately every two minutes she was awake.
This would be a prodigious feat even for the above-mentioned 13-year-old, who had no other real claims on her time or attention. It is all the more astonishing when one considers that the witness in question is a college educated 28-year-old single mother of two who is employed in a fairly responsible position at a major corporation. With all that texting one has to marvel that she is able to find time to feed and clothe her children, let alone accomplish anything at work.
The sheer volume of texts provoked astonishment, but their content caused me to despair. In addition to being depressingly crass and banal, they were so riddled with flagrant departures from the norms of grammar, syntax, and spelling as to be virtually incomprehensible. In fact, it took me several hours before I felt confident in my comprehension of the texts. I actually consider this no mean feat, as they were written in what can best be described as a unique dialect whose relation to standard English is on par with Jamaican patois or Glaswegian (the latter of which I was only able to understand passably after living in Scotland, with a Glaswegian roommate, for some months).
So I understand American society is facing a number of serious problems. We can’t control our borders, the rate of out of wedlock births continues to rise, and the leviathan state is an increasingly ubiquitous presence every facet of our lives, but I submit these threats pale to insignificance when compared to the deleterious effect texting has had on our society.
What do you think? Do you text? If so, how much? Has texting had any effect on your interpersonal relations or on your general ability to communicate?
Photo Credit: Flickr user jhaymesisvip.
Published in General
It’s the modern version of greeting a guest at a party as you peer over his/her shoulder to ascertain whether there is somebody more “important” in the room.
Yeah, it’s all texting’s fault.
Point taken, but the distinction is that the top picture depicts people reading prose written in standard English. If they are not proficient writers of standard English already, such reading will help them become so. In contrast, the bottom picture (if all those people are, in fact, texting) depicts people in the process of communicating in a medium which will likely degrade their ability to write standard English properly.
Good point but equally tragic is that folks are taking selfies and instagramming as opposed to simply living in the damned moment.
You do not have any way to know:
a) The quality of the prose in the newspapers in the above photograph.
b) The quality of the prose on the devices in the below photograph.
1 d0|\|’7 |<|\|0\/\/ \/\/|-|@ j00Z r \/\/0RR13D 4B0U7
See here for translation.
http://www.brenz.net/services/l337Maker.asp
IWTBOT, IWTWOT, IWTAOW, IWTAOF, IWTEOB, IWTEOI, IWTSOL, IWTSOD, IWTSOH, IWTWOD, WHEBU, WHNBU, WWAGDTH, WWAGDTOW – IS, TPWSFLTPP, TSOINAIOIBR, FGOFE, ITSPOCO.
– Charles Dickens
Using a code to communicate prose does not degrade the prose itself.
This example is no different than if you had posted the same text using Braille, or Morse Code, or hexadecimal ASCII, or an Enigma Machine.
The original argument was not that some people use abbreviations and codes to compress information when communicating, and that this is inherently harmful.
The original argument was that, because of the very existence of the technology:
1) too many people are disengaging from face-to-face verbal communication, and
2) too many people are communicating too much with people remotely.
I counter that:
1) teenaged girls failing to engage verbally at family gatherings is hardly a new phenomenon,
2) that people failing to engage with strangers verbally in public is also hardly a new phenomenon (“There’s nothing to do in an elevator except not talk to the other guy.” – George Carlin), and
3) that complaints about the proliferation of remote communication is also not a new phenomenon. (“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” – Henry Thoreau)
q) What’s the difference between a teenaged girl sending and receiving texts at the dinner table and a teenaged girl reading a book at the dinner table?
a) Few parents would allow her to read a book at the dinner table.
Do we know for a fact that texting degrades a person’s ability to write properly? It’s not an unreasonable assumption, but do we know if it is true? Maybe it is but the one study I’ve read about the topic says that it does not.
Well, yeah. I mean you’d get food on your book. That’s no way to treat a book.
Indeed, I have read all sorts of articles that claim the increased use of textual remote communication is contributing (statistically-speaking) to increased literacy, overall.
Prior to the “text/email” generation, the teenaged population was dominated by non-textual information in the form of television, movies, radio, and the telephone, and that this had a negative effect on literacy overall.
Before television, movies, radio, and the telephone, teenaged literacy was negatively effected by the lack of light in the coal mine or textile factory where they worked until an early death.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-complaints-about-modern-teens-that-are-statistically-bs/
I can’t recall precisely where, but I’ve read about research indicating that language shapes our thoughts. If we don’t develop a vocabulary for certain ideas and concepts, those concepts never enter our consciousness. Of course the relationship between consciousness and language goes both ways, and ultimately feeds on itself. But this would suggest that using more precise language not only reveals us to be better thinkers, but makes us better thinkers.
I used to think that PowerPoint was a fine tool, but as with any tool, can be used properly or improperly. But I’ve since come around to the POV of Edward Tufte: By artificially constraining the form of communication, PP is tool that corrupts the thought process. It forces reasoning to take the form of 1-page chunks. In a similar way, I think the shift from email to many small text messages, and from blogging to twitter, corrupts the thought process. It discourages deep consideration, argument from evidence, and any thought that takes more than 140 characters to develop and express. A little texting is fine. A lot of texting is dangerous.
And yet, lots of people complain that the shift from letter-writing to email corrupts the thought process, and that the shift from newspapers to blogs corrupts the thought process.
However, prior to email was letter-writing really the dominant form of communication, or rather was communication dominated by the telephone and the television?
The idea that human communication reached it’s apex with email and blogs seems to me to be as nonsensical as the (stereotypical-and-not-at-all-accurate) Amish idea that technology is fine as long as it was invented before the steam engine.
It’s an arbitrary cut-off derived from the technological medium you happen to prefer because it’s the one you cut your teeth on.
“My heavens, Mabel, it’s no wonder businessmen are so amoral when they confine their communications to short telegrams! It perverts their thinking processes! Why send a telegram when they could talk to each other instead?”
Texting is, yet again, merely another example of an activity which used to be confined to the upper classes which is now available to the masses thanks to wealth being more evenly distributed across the population.
In the past, the ability to send a short text message at the speed of light was limited to people who could afford the cost of a telegram.
(You can still send a telegram today. In Canada it costs $24.95 + $0.99 per word.)
The cost of sending a short text message at the speed of light has come down so much that it’s even within the reach of children.
THAT’S what scares people. It’s not the technology. It’s the idea that the technology is so cheap that anybody can use it. It must be controlled, so “we” can make sure that this technology is only ever used in “correct” ways that are “beneficial” to “society”.
To that I say, in the words of General Anthony McAuliffe at the Battle of Bastogne, “nuts!”
If someone thinks that text messaging is harmful, I suggest they lobby for a law which sets a minimum number of words for all human communications.
One other thought: I haven’t had dinner with very many teenaged girls, but I’m skeptical that I’d be all that interested in their dinner conversation. There’s a reason so many people exile a large percentage of the attendants to the “kids’ table” at family gatherings.
I wasn’t trying to suggest that communication hit its apex (Ricochet is still working on that). Every transition has advantages and disadvantages. The shift from letters, print & telegraph to television & telephone improved the timeliness of communication and the ability to convey emotion, while dumbing down the content. A shift from telephone to Web (email, blogging, & e-zines) improved literacy (at least according to a couple of articles I’ve seen in the popular press), but has pushed people to self-segregate and become less interactive with others in real life. Texting and social media have improved (intermediated) interactivity while decreasing reflection and reasoning. But video calling and chat can also improve interactivity. From a social standpoint, I think the negatives of a rapid-fire-texting culture outweigh the positives.
I question the accuracy of that statement as well. The “content” of the past often appears superior because only the very best examples survive to the present day.
The pre-television mass-production of muckraking scandal sheets, gossip rags, sensational propaganda pamphlets, tijuana bibles, failed novels that nobody ever read, and all manner of other printed trash, never seem to enter into the equation.
Ring Lardner’s satirical “letters” from a functionally-literate baseball star to his best buddy illustrate to me that simply because people used to write on paper, it doesn’t mean that they wrote well.
Only when driving.
Granted, but an extremely useful life skill is to be able to converse with people of all ages and backgrounds, and said skill is sorely lack among many publically-educated (and especially unchurched) teenagers. They simply aren’t exposed to anyone who wasn’t born within twelve months of their birthday often enough to be able to converse. Taking them to dinner parties is part of the socialization that kids need — because where else are they going to learn?
I am not at all convinced that this is a skill that teenagers ever had prior to the invention of the short text message, whether they were educated publicly or privately.
After all, there’s a reason why teenaged girls were told since at least 1450 that they, “should be seen and not heard.”
I think if the parent is more concerned with the character length of each message than they are about the fact that their children are communicating without parental supervision with unknown parties outside the home, their priorities are greatly misplaced.
I agree that the dinnertime socialization process is important, but it would be equally subverted if the teen was doing differential calculus instead of texting.
Then you should meet more homeschooled teenagers. iWc’s son is a great example how not being “socialized” to only interact with one’s age provides a teenager with the confidence and skills to interact with adults. Now, I will certainly agree teenagers unable to relate with anyone outside their peer group predates the text message. I don’t think it (at least to the extent that teenagers sit sullenly while adults converse around them) predates the factory-style classroom, however.
“A young woman should be seen and not heard” is the exact opposite of this problem, so I’m not sure what your point is. Clearly, the girls were quite willing to talk to older men and women, which is why the saying is trying to get them to shut up!
There’s probably also an element regarding the invention of adolescence that comes into this as well. When a teenager *is* an adult, the idea that they don’t belong in the adult conversation is silly.
Absolutely. I do think it’s fair to note that more teens will be interested in texting than doing calculus, however. :D
Or having the parties in your home as did my parents and expecting the offspring to contribute to the conversation whether it revolves around politics, sports, or business. I sat next to Big Ten coaches, ADs, and QBs along with CEOs, doctors, and attorneys and was always expected to hold my own.
Funny thing about expectations …
I think the point I was trying to make was that if the teenaged girl in question is more interested in texting than in adult conversation, I may be better off as a dinner participant if she remains distracted by her phone.
In all these hyp0thetical situations, I presume that the teenaged girl in question isn’t my kid, and it ain’t my dinner table, so I had no say in her upbringing and I have way more stake in my own dinnertime socialization than I have in her’s.
;-)
I will certainly not argue that most teenagers’ brains are full of mush!
However, as someone yet to be granted the opportunity to raise kids of my own, I feel that I ought to do what I can to replace the mush in the skulls of the teenagers around me with critical thought. As teenagers are often cynical of their authority figures, implanting conservative ideas is just a matter of being cynical of the liberal authorities in their lives. :D
“Put down that phone so I can educate you on critical thought,” is not a fight I’m eager to have with somebody else’s kid.
We homeschool our kids. (Our fifth year of it starts on Monday!) When people ask if we worry about socialization, I say “Yes! That’s why we homeschool them!”
Great response, Drew. I’m using that one!