When I work out at the gym, I like to get a treadmill between 2 TVs. I like one screen to have CNN American Morning on and the other to have Good Morning America? Why? I feel like I’m getting both my national and local news all in one shot. Being that there is no sound, I don’t feel like one is interrupting the other. I can get the headlines I want to go look into further at work. So, the point of this was there was a CNN story this morning was about texting addictions and teens. 3/4 of 12 to 17 year olds have cellphones, up from 45 percent in 2004. That is RIDIC in my opinion. WOW!!
The average teen is sending 50 texts a day. Girls, obviously, texting more than boys. This was like ehh, whatever to me. But it made me think of the good old art of passing notes in class. Why was this the correlation? Because these 12-17 year olds are in school all day and thats what we did in school when it was my day. Sure, you u can be more stealthy sending a quick text in class, and its great, hopefully noiseless. But can you refer back to those texts 10 years later ?? Being the pack rat that I am, I still have some old school notes in a shoe box somewhere. Whenever I’m packing up to move I come across this box (which is sooo hard to part with) and I get nostalgic reading those letters. I laugh at the sheer trivial-ness and blasphemy of it all. You cannot do that with texts. These kids/teens are missing out. SERIOUSLY!!!
Flicking a match on my old yellowing papers will rid me of them quickly. Some of my friends don’t even know I have these letters. One day we’ll have a drunken ladies night, reminiscing over bad high school crushes and horrible ideas.
What phone/server is storing messages for years? What if you lose your phone. Also noted, texts are NEVER truly destroyed. If the cops/feds/super hackers reeaaalllyy wanted they could get incriminating texts. Someone may have saved the convo to email (*ahem Tiger’s hoes*) and they can come back to haunt you, but that’s not the same as these nostalgic letters.
The sad thing about this is that these frequent texters aren’t going to get any better as they get older. Don’t get me wrong, my blackberry is *almost* always in my hand and BBM is a way of life, but I still can socialize. I still know how to say ‘hello can I speak to —–” if I call somewhere vs “hey” from always calling cells. We’ve alll heard my gripes about people who communicate only via text. if you have my #. Use it
FYI: If you have an Android phone, you can backup all your texts ( as I do ) to your Gmail account. All you need is a free program from the Android Market called SMS backup.
Google is going to take over the world!! Its true! That’s a handy feature I didn’t k now about … *note to self–never send incriminating messages to anyone with an Android*