cruel to be kind

I stumbled across an interesting article in the Washington Post today “For Texting Teens, an OMG Moment When the Phone Bill Arrives”

it talks about how teenagers in the US send thousands of text messages per month (one single teenager that is) and how that increases the phone bills. For Europeans, this is not so much news as sms have been here en vogue for a longer time than in the US but I was still shocked about the numbers.

The article ends with some warm nice story about the kid – in the beginning the one with the thousands of sms – goes on a vacation and has to talk to other kids “in real”. We know this kind of story building.

That aside I surely see how people in everyday life use SMS around me, and also use chat as a way of communicating. Tools like twitter.com (think chat goes sms on speed) make it even easier to go this route.

I have been saying for some years now that I am curious to see the day when people enter the work place who grew up on email and chat as they will have quite a different expectation on how communcation works rather than somebody grown up on expensive telefon calls like myself.

It is even more strange to think about a teenager which is in constant chat mode to imagine they would be able to concentrate on something in solitude. :)

E-mail is said to be for the old people, and writing real letters (perhaps even by hand?) for dead people?

Looking at the way most companies still work (successfully btw), I cant even start to imagine what it will mean for employers having to deal with this kind of new type of employee.

I would be interested to hear about your thoughs on this article and how the use of text messaging is done in your country and if you can tell from your own childreen perhaps.

The part about text messages being out of the control of parents btw was especially intruiging. :)

“It’s a form of silent communication; they can do it whenever, they can do it fairly secretively,” said Rob Callender, trends director for Teenage Research Unlimited. In a recent study of teens, he said, TRU found that texting is the second most popular use for cellphones, right after using them to check the time. Plus, every phone number a child calls is recorded on the family phone bill, with a time stamp. But text messages remain an anonymous, faceless lump number.

Tags: text messaging, sms, youth

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