TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
I'm always amazed at the way a young person these days seems to be able to text away at seemingly amazing speeds on the numerical keypad of an otherwise ordinary cell-phone. And come away thinking how cool it is that they've been able to learn to do that, much as I had to learn how to type on a QWERTY keyboard at their age.
But this cautionary piece in the New York Times about the potential downside of unlimited texting by teenagers especially, raises some other aspects of this phenomenon. First the context:
"Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, 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.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation."
All this may be too early to blame just on texting, as the piece goes on to emphasize,
"The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data
on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of
the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for
three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents
develop."
Another thing for teenagers to learn to do in moderation, as if the list wasn't already long enough.
Comments