Post 8

“Teenagers with cellphones each send and receive 2,272 text messages a month on average” (Shellenbarger, For Teens, Has Texting Replaced Talking? 1)

Texting is undeniably important in an average day of my life. It’s sad, in ways my phone should really just be attached to my body as a fifth appendage. I own an iPhone and there truly is an app for everything a person could possibly do in a day. From communicating with others, listening to music, driving based off the GPS, watching movies at a theater, logging on to Facebook, tweeting, cooking, buying airplane tickets, shopping online, and the list goes on. My freakin’ phone tells me when to stop drinking alcohol…  It’s gross but I’m hooked. I have lost my phone at times and truly thought I was going to die. But, back to one small feature of the smartphone, texting.

“Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say). (Thompson, Death of the Phone Call 2)

This is nothing but the truth. I love the ability to be able to text a friend and give them the time to respond when it is most convenient for them. And, on the flipside I can respond to a text I received two hours ago and pick up, right where the conversation left off.  Phone calls and voicemail are becoming irrelevant in my social network, which I feel is the same in most of my friend’s social networks. The majority of voice mails I receive I honestly don’t listen to:

“We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to” (Thompson, Death of the Phone Call 2)

I honestly hate them. For some reason the last thing I want to do is have some person bicker at me for all of five minutes and at no point in the lecturing, can I interrupt and repudiate. Even my mom gets it, if she calls and I don’t pick up she will just leave me a text, that is quick and to the point. My friends just skip the phone call part and text me, as they know this form of communication is superior. The pros out weigh the cons when it comes to texting, as our generation ages it will be interesting to see if we continue to text or if this communication form will become irrelevant as did the phone call.

What do you think? Will texting be a communication form we take into our 50’s, or will a new superior form arise?