COLUMN: Let's Exchange Hundreds of Text Messages

By Tobin Barnes
IDGI.

That’s texting lingo for “I don’t get it.”

And I really don’t. Texting is totally beyond me.

Novelist William Gaddis once said, “There have never in history been so many opportunities to do so many things that aren’t worth doing.” Texting was invented to prove this statement.

Admittedly, I’m normally about as personally communicative as any given trash can. My wife asks me what I’m thinking about, and usually I say, “Nothing.” For all she knows, I could be Forrest Gump with little more than a barely audible electronic buzz active in my brain.

But still. Where does the need to constantly text other people come from? IDGI.

Okay, maybe my old fogey is emerging here. But really, I love much of the new technology. Oftentimes, I’m an early adopter—with, that is, the very notable exception of cell phone key punching. ISDGI. It’s not for me.

But evidently, it very much is for millions of others. And rabidly so. Especially amongst teenagers.

The statistics are alarming, as revealed in the recent New York Times article “Texting May Be Taking a Toll” by Katie Hafner:

“American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.”

Eighty messages a day! Holy mackerel! And that’s the average. Some kids are routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.

When do they find time to do anything else? Like, for example, school work.

“They do it (texting) late at night when their parents are asleep,” says Hafner. “They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.”

Behind their backs? Till their thumbs hurt? In my classroom?

Could be. I’m not naive enough to think my classroom would be immune from this cancer.

The explosion of texting has arisen from the typically unlimited texting allowances many cell phone plans carry.

In the article, a California chemistry teacher, Deborah Yager, said she anonymously surveyed her students to find that most of them text during class.

“Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honor student in Bethesda, Md., used to text on her tiny LG phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard,” the article reported. “A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs.”

Annie said that like most, her school doesn’t allow cell phones to be used during class, but “she could text by putting it under her coat or desk.”

What if all this skill and energy were channeled into academics? We wouldn’t be twentieth in the world by almost every measurement. We can only hope the students in India and China and Japan also catch the texting fever to level the playing field.

I went to a text translation site. Here’s an example of text lingo our kids can crank out better than a Spanish lesson:

“luvU nt bec of hu UR , bt bec of hu Im wen I am with U”

For you text-illiterate fogies like me, that translates to this:

“I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you”

Maybe we’ve come to the point where almost every thought that pops into our mind can now be shuttled almost instantaneously to someone else’s mind.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

I doubt it.

Is this stuff Brave New World or Freak City?

I’m betting on Freak City and hoping it eventually dies a lonely death like the once ubiquitous CB radio.