OPINION: Don't kids talk anymore?
Eileen White Jahn of Rockville Centre chairs the business administration department at St. Joseph's College in Patchogue. The average American teenager, aged 13-17, racks up 3,339 texts a month. OMG!
Actually, I'm not surprised. The two teens in my house can probably generate this much in one afternoon if they put their minds and thumbs to it.
My six kids each got cell phones later than their friends. I was continually assured that I was ruining their social lives, but I didn't buy it - at least not until my fifth child turned 13. Though her older siblings all had to wait until their senior year, she claimed she needed one STAT!
Times were different now! Everybody has one! She had no life without a cell phone! I nicknamed her My Daily Torment - MDT in text-speak. Finally, worn down, we purchased one for her 14th birthday. Within minutes it started humming with texts, and it hasn't stopped since.
Kids don't talk to each other anymore; they just text. A mere five years ago, my airtime minutes used to burn up exponentially. Now they languish.
But at least now, my kids answer me. Apparently it is just too inconvenient to take my calls, but they will spare me a quick text.
Me: "I have been calling you all night, are you still alive?''
Offspring: "K.''
Still, without the tone or inflection of a call or the leisurely length of an e-mail, the medium is fraught with miscommunication potential. My son texted to ask if he could keep my car a few more hours; I texted back, "Okay." He called to find out why I was angry. My lack of an exclamation point made him think so.
Everyone finds texting hard to resist. Kids wake up in the middle of the night and shoot off a text. I teach college, and I see students sneaking a text while pretending to check the time. Even I know that you don't need your thumbs to check the time. Adults are just as bad - as I write this, my sister is texting me from a training seminar at work.
And don't even get me started on the texting while driving. I have seen countless idiots steering with their forearms, phone clutched in the middle of the steering wheel. Their thumbs are flying and their eyes are bobbing up and down. I'd honk, but I'm afraid I'd startle them right off the road.
When I was a teen, my parents remembered a time when phones were of limited accessibility. They lamented the hours we kids wasted "on the horn" catching up on nothing. Their own parents shunned the phone completely, preferring to write warm chatty letters to the folks they had left back in Ireland.
Who can say where this is all going? Certainly not I, 'cause I GTG - the 13-year-old just texted and needs a ride home.
