Texting ideas

I recently had a bit of a revelation in terms of the implications of texting to modern American society. I had previously always believed that the gloom-and-doom sociologists who were saying that texting was the death of the English language, as well as modern Western society, were simply full of it. However, I had an interesting experience while dining at Southside a few days ago. I had just finished eating, when I got up to take my dishes to the dish depository and turning my head I noticed three female students in the booth behind me. What caught my attention was that they were all just sitting there and not talking. Now, I understand that in some circles it is good manners and considered polite to simply eat one’s lunch and not talk at the table. However, these particular students were not observing polite table manners. Instead, they were not talking because two of them were texting and the third was simply sitting there with her cell phone on the table. I began to think about it and I realized that I had not heard a continuous conversation coming from that booth the entire time I was eating, only the occasional word or phrase. This brings me to one conclusion: that texting had almost completely eliminated the desire for face-to-face speech between these students in their “down time.” Essentially, this group of girls was completely content to carry on communications with what amounts to a web of friends through their cell phones. This web of people is continuously in contact, sending messages back and forth to many other people within that web, and for one single person to stay in this social network, as it were, they had to continuously engage in these little one-liner messages back and forth otherwise they wouldn’t be savvy to the newest information inside this network and would simply fall out of the web. I think that humans are inherently a social creature and that staying in contact with each other is the only way to maintain a society. Therefore, people within a society have an inherent need to stay within that society. There is in fact a term used for people who do not participate in this behavior: antisocial; this is considered a disorder in psychological terms. Getting back to the point, however, people are in need of social contact and cellular phones, in particular texting with cellular phones, enable people maintain a higher level of social contact. The problem arises with the fact that text messages are very short because of the character limit and therefore cannot convey a lot of information like a deep thought. The second problem is that there is an amount of time spent waiting on the text that one receives as a reply. This means that it is very difficult to convey a long deep thought over the course of several messages because it comes off as disjointed, awkward, and very difficult to tie together. Subsequently, texting is very suited and, in fact funnels one into, making short, flarfy one-liners back and forth between people just to maintain contact. However, because this is the kind of communication that people get used to, they are then fairly incapable of keeping up long, deep, face-to-face conversations with people. Instead, even in a face-to-face situation such as eating lunch together, this group of students communicated to each other in speech just as they would with texting: in short, concise, humorous one-liners with long spaces in between replies such that no continuous conversation was happening. This has very interesting implications in terms of the ability of this and future generations to communicate deep, meaningful thoughts. As a result, those gloom-and-doom sociologists don’t seem so loony anymore.