Why texting might be bad for you

By Stephen L. Carter

March 2 (Bloomberg) -- If you’ve suspected lately that your family’s mobile-phone bill is driven entirely by your 15-year- old, you are probably right. A recent Nielsen report shows that children aged 13 to 17 average an astonishing 3,417 text messages a month -- some 45 percent of all text messages. This breaks down to seven texts “every waking hour,” or roughly one every 8 1/2 minutes.

But those who look at this data and worry that young people are over-texting may be asking the wrong question. The more pertinent concern may be not the amount, but the function. Many observers argue that the social world of teenagers and even young adults is nowadays largely constituted by text messaging.

Maybe so. Certainly a principal reason cited by many teens for their use of texting is that it is fun. In some surveys, young people reported that they prefer texting to conversation. And “prefer” may be too weak a word. Many young people, when not allowed to text, become anxious and jittery.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of reports on television about researchers who say they have found teens addicted to their mobile phones. Perhaps a better way to view the data is as an illustration of how mobile phones in general, and texting in particular, have taken over the experiential world of the young. An economist might expect that teens deprived of texting would simply substitute another method of communication - - talking, for instance. As it turns out, a significant minority will not. They will behave instead, researchers report, the way people do when deprived of human contact.

Texts Define Friendship

The phone, in other words, is not merely a tool through which teens keep in touch with friends. It is the technology that defines their social circle. If they cannot text someone, that person may as well not exist.

Still, I am not criticizing the technology itself. Like most people of all ages these days, I find texting far too convenient to ignore -- although, to be sure, my usual quota is two or three texts a day, not seven an hour.

The trouble is that texting arose suddenly, not gradually: Originally included in mobile phones as a tool to enable service providers to spam their customers, it actually came to the U.S. later than most of the industrialized world. David Mercer, in his 2006 book “The Telephone: The Life Story of a Technology,” suggests that the popularity of the practice rose sharply when viewers were urged to text their votes for the winner on such television programs as “American Idol.”

This break from past practice was so radical that adults had no opportunity to work out from their own experience reasonable bounds for the young. And so the young, unbounded, freely created their own world, from which the old are largely excluded.

Fears of what young people might be like if left free to design the world have long been with us: Think “Lord of the Flies,” “A Clockwork Orange” or “Children of the Corn.” That imponderable I leave for others to weigh. I don’t believe that over-texting will create dangerous psychopaths. But it might create something else.