You look to the left and the girl next to you looks beneath her purse and starts banging the buttons on her cell phone like she has since week one. You and your friend are watching Monday Night Football and he starts two-thumbing the second before an interception. Yes, almost all of us text continuously, so much so the chances of having a conversation with someone who isnít already having their own on the phone is unlikely. Thereís nothing wrong with the concept of texting, weíve just taken it way too far.
Of course, I text as well, and Iím not mad at anyone who does. The whole point of texting was to let someone receive a quick piece of information instead of calling them for a five second conversation. Thereís nothing wrong with how we started off. The problem is when we have entire dialogues and novels in our texts daily. Instead of interacting and perceiving the situation around us, Americans constantly look to their phones to see who is doing what somewhere else.
There are a couple inherent problems to texting, such as the elimination of grammar. So much for knowing what a gerund is, most of us are lucky if we can correctly spell ìtomorrow” or ìGrandpa is killing grandma.” The short, peppered sentences are a bastardization of our language structure. We have shorthand abbreviations that we use in notes, and we type pretty informally on the web often enough, but I would wager thereís a significant number of people who text more than they type or write on paper. ìWat u up 2?” is not helping us become more eloquent.
Texting also decreases the ever-vanishing human contact we have daily. Now people are not even hearing the voice of their acquaintance, let alone seeing a face. Words cannot sufficiently express sarcasm, honesty, respect; even a joke can end up being thought of as an insult without 20 minutes of texting a rationale. And no, ìLol” is not the same as hearing a laugh and seeing a smile. How does texting help us interact with people so we can communicate effectively when it counts, like an interview, a speech at a function or working on a group task? The main problem of texting is this substitution of such an informal system into a majority of our communications with people.
Texting etiquette really also hasnít been established quite yet. Sure, texting in class isnít supposed to happen, but finding an outlet for your boredom in class isnít something new to the system. The main questions are from situations where no one really calls someone out for texting, like at dinner with friends, when youíre playing basketball, when a conversation is interrupted by some lame rap loop. Why are we so focused on finding out what is happening in places that we are not? Itís not like someone else is having an epic time at 4:30 in the afternoon and we need to know. It seems many people are forfeiting the experiences around them so they can talk to someone else, meet up with them, and then forfeit those moments by texting someone else.
It also leads to human stupidity. Texting while driving is stupid. Itís dangerous and completely unnecessary. In fact, a study found driving while texting is 23 times more likely to result in an accident than if you werenít. In addition, now we have as young as seventh graders sexting each other and getting into legal trouble with it (How hard it is it to hide a naked picture? Itís been done by every teenage boy since the 70s). Recently, government scandals have surfaced due to texting, like the former mayor of Detroit Kwame Kilpatrick sending 14,000 texts over the span of a year to his Chief of Staff; both married and both sending sexually explicit messages. We need to stop and use those evolved brains more instead of texting like automatons with no consequences.
If you find yourself button mashing on the phone today, take a moment to see if itís really necessary to have this inseparable connection to your handheld. No one will assume youíre dead if it takes more than two minutes to hear a response. Instead, enjoy the company of interacting with actual people, not text blurbs. Although technology has made interconnectivity a basic staple of the developed world, it doesnít mean we have to forfeit casual face-to-face interaction.
Source ó Edgar, Snyder and Associates, online.
John McGovern is a regular contributor to the Voice. He can be reached for comment at JMcGovern12@wooster.edu.