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I am so very old. I am such a fuddy-duddy. I wouldn't know a good time if it fell on my head and commenced to wiggle. Perhaps that last one is too strong. I would probably deduce after some momentary shock that a good time had made contact with my person and I would attempt to surmise just what all that wiggling business was about. Once I had made that connection, however, I would not immediately text all my friends and let them know about it.
That is because I continue to be enamored of communication in the long form. I became a teacher, in part, because I so very much enjoy the sound of my own voice. I became a writer because I wanted to share my love of language with anyone who had the time or patience to read those that I had strung together. I have fond memories of phone calls from my youth that lasted more than three hours. With these attitudes in mind, why would I ever choose to text? Finding new and clever ways to truncate my verbal exchanges seems both antithetical and confounding. In a world that strains for understanding, why would I suddenly begin to leave out all my consonants? I do not want everything I write to suddenly appear as though they were written by Prince.
And now the news: A third of U.S. teenagers with cell phones send more than one hundred texts a day. New research, from everybody's favorite Research Center, the Pew Internet and American Life Project says that texting is now youth's favored mode of communication. It gives me great pause to hear this, considering the monosyllabic nature of the interactions I have with so very many in that demographic. Texting is young. It's hip. It's lazy. And most insidiously, it's expensive. Even if you pay just pennies per garbled message, it adds up fast. That's why most phone companies will happily give you "unlimited texting" for twenty to thirty dollars a month. Three hundred and sixty dollars a year doesn't seem like much to keep your kid connected to his peers, especially when you consider that text messaging has become so much a part of teenagers' lives that eighty-seven percent of those who text said that they sleep with, or next to, their phone. Nyty nyt.