Notes on the Generation Gap

So each text sent from one teenager to another counts as two for the purpose of this study? (One sent, one received.)

It’s hard to believe that the average is distorted by a minority of massive users – that’s already a text every 7 to 9 minutes across the whole waking day.

Not so hard for me to believe. In one half-hour text conversation, Sprint says I burned through 90+ texts sent or received (and as cs notes, perhaps we should halve the number, as the amount ‘sent or received’ are also ‘sent or received’ by the other party). They’re like IM messages or twitter tweets, individual lines of conversation. Heavy users could probably hit a thousand in a weekend day…

I am guessing you don’t have a teenager. My daughter is below the mean, but it is amazing to watch a teenager send and receive texts in high volume in a short period.

I suppose if you think about it, reading thousands of texts is almost like reading a book.

The thing that really turns me off to texting is just how inconvenient it is to input text into a cellphone, compared to typing on a proper keyboard. I doubt even the most adept cellphone users can come close to my keyboard typing speed. And on second thought maybe that’s part of the attraction–like a friend once observed about eating pistachios, they wouldn’t be half as addictive if you could just scoop handfuls of them into your mouth. You savor them more because you eat them one-by-one, and the mechanical act of taking off the shells is satisfying. Maybe it’s the same with texting–there’s something relaxing about diluting the flood of information with a rote mechanical act.

9: I really think it’s simpler than that. All those devices have as much keyboard as they can fit, and have been trending away from the three-letters-per-number thing for a long time. It’s just that, at this point, you can’t fit a laptop in your pocket.

And at least in my experience, for short messages — which are 99% of them — with some practice, the reduced keyboards really aren’t a burden. I’m sure they’re still slower on average than a full-sized keyboard, but it’s hard to notice when the whole operation only takes a few seconds.

On the other hand, if you imagine that slight disadvantage over many 1000s of texts…

@11 Yeah, I even have a smartphone now, with qwerty keyboard and everything. I guess what I’m thinking about more is the choice to send texts rather than voicechatting. Like the oft-remarked on habit of American teenagers to use fillers like “like” that started 20-odd years ago, or the habit of sitting around and chatting while eating pumpkin or melon seeds (popular in the Middle East), people like to dilute their communication (and other sensory input) with mechanical, non-narrative filler. I would say it’s a way of dealing with information overload, but that would make it sound like it satisfies a need that only came into existence recently, which I don’t think is the case. I think it’s more like the “muscular bonding” that comes from group dances and military marching exercises.

American teenagers to use fillers like “like” that started 20-odd years ago

Well, I was saying “like” in the 60’s as a teenager, so the usage is at least 40 years old.

And of course, all the teenage girls were hogging the family phone back then too.

And p.s. I doubt the numbers are very different from how many conversational turns many people take in a given day. I once tried to figure out how many typed pages a two-hour conversation would fill. I don’t remember what I came up with, but it was a lot of pages.

I think that it probably is distorted by a relatively small percentage of massive users. It’s hard to achieve big volume on a little Nokia feature phone, but all too easy if you’re using an interface like the iPhone’s, which presents SMS messages in the same way as a chat log from ICQ or MSN or the IRC of yore — which is to say, it encourages people sending super-short conversational messages like “lol” every 30 seconds for an hour.

And re: the first comment about a message being counted once when it’s sent and once when it’s received, some messages will be counted many more times than twice (when someone sends a message to a dozen friends at once).

Isn’t each text message like 10 cents? If so, hat means on average each kid is spending over 300 dollars a month. Is there a phone plan I don’t know about here or is the recession really over?

While the numbers a bit astonishing regardless, one thing to keep in mind – especially in the case of teenage girls who message with their friends – is that if they text 5 of their friends at the same time, to the carriers this counts as 5 text messages. If they respond, that’s 5 messages back.

I suspect these numbers are tad bit inflated for reasons like this.

I think some people in this thread are also imagining every one of these thousands of received texts appearing as a sudden interruption in the kid’s daily routine. That’s not how it is at all, because of the conversational burstiness.

As a former English teacher in Thailand, I’m happy to say many Thai schools now forbid mobile phones at school. There’s no need for them (if there’s an emergency, the parents call the school) and it’s about time American schools saw this. They go to school for an education, not to spend all day texting to friends. No wonder so many Americans are so poorly educated compared to much of the rest of the world :(

Well I never thought I’d see the day when somebody stands there screaming into that “tele-phone” contraption for minutes on end. As if they were talking to an actual person!

@21 & @26: You or your friends need to change plans. In fact, part of being a parent of teenage girls is figuring out what plan will accomodate your daughter’s desired texting volume most economically. (I think my daughter’s is more like 2000 than 3000 per month.)

Like many other consumer companies (e.g., credit card issuers, health clubs), a good piece of the phone companies’ revenue comes from dinging consumers who misestimate their future usage. This can leave you with a whopping bill, which in turn leads to yelling at the teenage daughter, which leads to an outraged sense of injustice on her part, because she isn’t texting more heavily than her friends, etc. Downward spiral, no communication between father and daughter, unhealthy compensatory relationships with other males, teen pregnancy, heroin addiction . . . all because you didn’t get the right cell phone plan.

Texting has some other advantages that are worth noting:
— It’s face-saving. The person who sends you a text can’t tell if you got it or what you’re doing. If you’re busy, you can just not reply. (You also don’t have to answer the phone, but if you don’t answer the phone, you won’t know what the other person wanted. With texts, you get the best of all worlds.)
— It’s non-disruptive. I’ll send texts even if I think the recipient might be busy, but I might not call.
— Precisely because there’s no strong norm that you have to reply to every text, you can send people messages that you wouldn’t call them for. The recipient gets the message and maybe gets a chuckle, but at a lower cost in time and effort than actually having a conversation.

@27 Probably a good chance you’ve seen this, but for anyone who hasn’t, here’s a Thai teacher getting tough on a cell phone user:

It’s the junk food of communication: fills an empty place but doesn’t really nourish. Five seconds later, the place is empty again.

Talking is like that too; it’s so unsatisfying, ten seconds after somebody tells me something I have to say something right back to them.

When my younger son (14 at the time, now 15)got his cell phone we had already learned with his older brother to go with the unlimited texting plan. But when we got the first bill, with only 15 days of his having a phone he had an astonishing 10956 text messages. Of those, 9654 were from his girl friend. They started at 6:36 am when he gets up to get read to go to school and stopped after midnight most nights. We ended up moving his phone charger into the living room so he could no longer text after bedtime the number came down. When talking with him and his friends during a drive (they were texting each other, as well as other friends not in the car) I discovered that most text during changing of classes, lunch and the bus rides to and from school. Most are two and three word responses, comments or reactions to things. Pictures also play a large part of the “conversation” as well. Since the majority of his friends have had cell phones since middle school (we are rather draconian in what we consider “proper” for a teenager) he had some catching up to do in terms of learning how to text. I and my husband have learned in self defense to text our sons in order to stay in the loop. We have discovered the great utility of it during large events where we are seperated to co-ordinated meetings, comment upon events, alert one another to some interesting things at large venues. It is also handy to text pick up a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread to keep the teenage hordes fed!

Interesting that most of the examples here refer to daughters…but …. I have a 13 year old son with no phone of his own. I know, child cruelty, report us immediately to the NSPCA.

He asked to borrow my phone one afternoon to set up a meeting via text with some friends. In five minutes, they had each texted each other something like 20 messages – i.e. 50-60 exchanges. I’m on a pay as you go payment plan because I scarcely ever use my phone – a 50 euro top up lasts 3-4 months. The total cost to me of the frenzied texting was about 3 euros in total, and most of the texts were 3-5 words.

Now, I remember well enough, distant though it is, my own adolescence and the totally vacant maunderings I used to indulge in with friends over the phone. Teenagers haven’t changed, but texting and IMing and Fbk make all that self-indulgent vacuousness much easier to sustain and prolong.

BTW, my son will have to earn the money to buy his own phone and payments. Having a record of the texts from this little episode, I am not spending my money on supporting a texting habit.

LOL to Mario…as a teacher, I’ve noticed that too.