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by SylviaW-17, 9 June 2009
What is the one object you swear that can't live without?
Almost every teen would agree that it would be almost impossible to survive without their cell phone. Their reasoning is not only based on the convenience of having one, but also on their reliance of text messaging.
According to a recent survey by the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion, 4 out of 10 high school students are “addicted to their mobile phones,” specifically text messaging. Furthermore, teachers have seen a direct correlation with students neglecting schoolwork and showing signs of sleep deprivation due to text messaging addiction.
While in the US, it has been estimated that 40% of teens send more than 1000 text messages a month. Most of them have every letter on the keypad memorized, and some states even hold contests to see who can text the most words per minute. Arizona is no exception. A junior at Pinnacle High School states that “Texting is my addiction, it’s my entertainment. I send 300 texts a day, so without a cell phone or text messaging I honestly don’t think my life would be the same.”
Whether it's texting the details about where to meet for lunch to a friend during class, setting a phone on vibrate to be sure not to miss a text, or promising your parents you won’t text during the family dinner, while sending a quick “call u l8er,” teens are sure never to miss a text, or leave their friends waiting for a reply.
As the technological world today continues to advance rapidly, this thing called verbal communication is becoming more and more obsolete. Since texting became popular in the mid-1990s, the amount of people writing letters and actually talking on the phone has been experiencing a decreasing trend. Whereas for people in the “old days”, they wrote letters, not emails, as a standard form of communication, which we now refer to as "the old fashioned way". There is a saying that can be applied here, “it's the thought that counts.” Even though emails and text messaging is undeniably faster, you know the person who wrote it thought of you longer than a few seconds, or in the case of epic-texts, minutes. The person writing a letter takes the time to get paper and an envelope then take it to the nearest mailbox. This shows that the person writing the letter, wanted to write you, otherwise, why go through all that trouble?
Don't get me wrong, texting is great, it's such an integrated part of our culture that it would be completely incomprehensible to abolish it. Instant gratification is one of the many rewards of texting. You want someone to know something within a few seconds, done. While most stereotypes put teens as the best "texters" in the world, due to the unending amount of experience with texting, texting is really for everyone. Yet, the verbal communication that is necessary in friendships and other relationships is diminishing because of this phenomenon. Texting, as well as e-mailing and other forms of non-verbal communication, take the extra thought and necessary personal contact out of the equation. Relationships can become much more distant at the cost of convenience and more time. But in today's society, it seems that is what people really care about, time. So if you want a truly personal relationship, pick up the phone, not to text, but to dial numbers (it may seem strange at first, I know), or better yet write a letter. You may actually get mail...in a mailbox, not an inbox.
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