Is Texting a Menace to the Nation's Youth?

By Mari Russo

Published: May 28, 2009

“Excessive texting” is the latest alarming teenage trend that the New York Times is onto. Readers have kept a story headlined “Texting May Be Taking a Toll” high on the Times' Most Read list for three days now.

If you’re looking for the kind of story newspaper editors love, you can never fail with the “crazy things the kids are up to now” genre. (Thursday’s “Hugging is out of control among teens” story makes this a banner week.) But they go even more nuts for a “technology is dangerous and threatens our very humanity” story -- and so the text-menace story is a double whammy.

Kids are sending a mind-boggling 80 text messages a day, a survey found. And it’s really bad for them and for society!

The texting story claims that doctors and psychologists worry that excessive texting is leading teens to anxiety, bad grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation. Also, it turns out, they’re texting their parents, of all people, and that’s hampering their development into autonomous adults.

Serious damage may be happening to their thumbs, too. At least the hugging story only has worried school administrators talking about clogging school hallways and an “unserious” academic atmosphere.

Not surprisingly, the story has inspired loud snickers across the web. Gawker responded with, “Wait, aren't our opposable thumbs what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom? In that case, could the text messaging/thumb destruction epidemic currently sweeping the nation eventually lead to the complete breakdown of all human society?”

The MentalFloss blog posted, “OMG, teenagers are overdoing something?! They’re getting cramped thumbs from too much technological twiddling? Say it ain’t so! (We used to call this Nintendo Thumb back in the day.)" The post turned off the sarcasm to point out wisely that “teens eventually learn to moderate their own behavior, and most come through it without impaired thumbs.”

The parenting blogs didn’t like the piece any better: “News flash, it’s not good for teens to text all the time,” one post began. Another had the headline, “Teens are texting maniacs -- Duh!”

Science blogs seem equally puzzled that the New York Times would trumpet this news: One asked, “Do people remember stuff about how widespread usage of telephones were going to cause problems too?”

Maybe it’s a good thing that the most eloquent rebuttal of this article has been on the New York Times website itself, in a post by Lisa Belkin on the Motherlode blog. “Like everything else in parenting and in life, we should aim to mitigate the abuse of a technology, not mourn its very existence,” Belkin says.

That nails the problem of not just this article but an entire outdated strain of mournful, fearful thinking about technology that is still alive and well at newspapers like the Times. And of course, it’s hard not to detect fear and mourning under the surface, too: Technology is taking away the job security of the very people who write and edit these articles.

But the purveyors of this stuff might feel better if they checked in with the latest brain research. UCLA’s Dr. Gary Small, for example, has a cool book called "iBrain" that explains that yes, using new technology is altering the structure of our brains -- just as it did when, say, we first started eating with forks.

There are good and bad things about this -- face-to-face social skills, for example, erode when a majority of social interactions happen virtually. But just as human beings were intelligent enough to develop these technologies, we’re also intelligent enough to come up with solutions to our problems.

Comments

November 18, 2009, 6:26AM
penis büyüt Says

penis büyütücü
penis büyütücü

November 11, 2009, 9:49AM
oyun Says

thank you

oyun

bodrum tatil

bayramören

November 08, 2009, 7:31PM
deldel Says

Wow, it was almost as if you were writing about sohpet sohbet odaları travesti evden eve nakliyatget rid of the ball if he was within ten feet of me travestiler about my experience playing against Travis Ford travesti sikiş Travis Ford. I quickly learned toporno izle porno izle my experience playing against porno sikiş sikiş were writing about sex izleOh, and the beauty of it all is that I get to claim my site is "serious" news,sikiş porno izle because we pirate stories from all the big papers, slap a new lead on them and sex izle pornoone of our gratis-faux "journalist's" mugshots and try to call it our own original chat sohbetThank you very much for this information. chatGood post thanks for sharing.chat odalarıI like this site ;)porno izleGood article, Some have served their entire adult lives--30-35 years--at one sikişnewspaper. Seems like the wrong people are ashamed. rn salary porno izle sikişSome nasty comments for a fairly serious subject. That's unfortunate.porno izleI don't think anyone has a clear idea of what's going to happen, but you're right sikişabout the fact that journalists aren't doing anything about it. That's only porno izledelaying printed media's death. They appear to be holding out with the hope dizi izlethat somebody or something comes along and saves them, ala, the automobile chat chat odalarıFact is, printed media needs to die so that it can be reborn, so the business porno izlemodel adjusts into something that works. maynet porno izleThey appear to be holdingporno They appearsikiş yes sikiş no porno izleyesmaynet branda branda branda terazi baskül çelik kasa elektronik tartı elektronik terazi tartı terazi tartı travesti They appear

November 06, 2009, 10:06AM
Maria Nolichins Says

Thank's you admins my name is Chons

----------------

PenisSağlıkMerkezi.com
Penis Büyütücü hap
Penis Büyütme hapı
Penis Büyütücü v-pills

VPills-Bayi.com
Penis Büyütücü hap
Penis Büyütme hapı
Penis Büyütücü v-pills

V-PillsMağaza.com
Penis Büyütücü hap
Penis Büyütme hapı
Penis Büyütücü v-pills

Orkideshop.com
Seks Shop alışveriş mağazası
Sex Shop erotik mağaza
Sexshop cinsel ürünler
Seks ürünler ve oyuncakları
Seksi çeşitlerle dolu ürünler
Sex oyuncakları ve kozmetik ürünleri
Shop mağazası, her türlü cinsel ürünler

Penis Büyütücü ürünü tanıtım sayfası
Şişme Bebek ürünlerinin tanıtım sayfası
Vibratör ürünlerinin tanıtım sayfası
Göğüs Büyütücü ürünlerinin tanıtım sayfası
Bayan Azdırıcı ürünlerinin tanıtım sayfası
Geciktirici Sprey ürünlerinin tanıtım sayfası
Cinsel Sağlık ürünlerinin satışının gerçekleştiği sitenin tanıtım sayfası
İç Giyim ürünlernin bulunduğu kategoriyi tanıtan özel sayfa

October 15, 2009, 4:08AM
john Says

Thank you very much for this information.
Good post thanks for sharing.
I like this site ;)
-----------

promosyon promosyon ürünleri
seo seo danışmanlığı
penis büyütücü penis büyütme hapı
büro mobilyası Ofis ve büro mobilyası
Yachts for Sale Yachts for Sale
sohbet odaları sohbet odaları
Mücevher Mücevher satış noktası
Pırlanta Pırlanta burada
branda Ucuz branda fiyatları
Engelliler Engelliler ve engelli dostlarının paylaşım platformu.
Otomatik kapı Otomatik cam kapı sistemleri
Tercüme Tercüme ve Çeviri
Turkey medical company directory Turkey medical company directory
--^^-------

May 29, 2009, 8:11PM
Maria Russo Says

Thanks for the questions, Mark. I don't think coming up with a specific number of allowable texts is the answer to the problem of a teenager who is overstressed and who texts a lot. Eighty seems like a lot of texts, but what if, say, 30 of them at a time are part of one back and forth conversation -- like an IM?

You'd have to take a holistic approach to a particular kid, and that kid's problems, before you could decide the most reasonable way for that kid's parents and teachers to help him/her use texting in a way that is not harmful.

Why couldn't the NYT article be about, say, "Finding ways to keep teens' texting under control," instead of being presented as though it were evidence "against" texting, period? In fact, why couldn't it be written more like the hugging article, which was not taking a stand about hugging? Texting is, after all, above all a way to communicate and connect to friends. Because it's a new technology, though, the tone too often becomes alarmist and yes, fearful and mournful.

I agree with Lisa Belkin -- and her post that I link to is well worth reading -- that given the positive ways technology like texting has improved life, and given that there is no turning back, we should keep the conversation about it focused on ways to help mitigate the inevitable problems that come with it.

May 29, 2009, 10:17AM
Suzette Valle Says

Ah, yes, texting. This is a topic I dealt with a short while ago on my blog post "Tasteless Texting". There must be a happy medium we'll arrive at some point , just as we did with the fear of robotics and computers taking over all of our jobs, etc. For now, as a parent, I prefer a child texting over making 80 cell phone calls while I wait to hear conclusive evidence on cell phone use causing cancer.

As for the hugging fad, this is an old custom in my country of origin, Mexico, and many other European and Latin American countries as well. We even add a kiss to this form of greeting, and as you know, other countries do the double-cheek kiss. I guess the USA is adjusting to this adopted greeting custom, and it's feeling a little...smothered?

May 29, 2009, 9:15AM
Mark Bauerlein Says

So tell us, Mari, how many texts you think are reasonable for a teen each day?

And how easy is it to dismiss arguments against technology in the life of kids by calling it "mournful" and "fearful"?