Average Teen Output – Eighty Text Messages per Day

According to a recent Nielsen study, the typical teen in this country sends nearly 80 text messages every day. How many minutes does it take to send 80 text messages per day? We probably really don’t want to know, because that much time is cutting into homework, class work, social time (unless you consider text messaging social time), and sleep. Observation of the populace in any setting, be it restaurants, shopping, or walking the dog, will find people utilizing their cell phones, non-stop. Most teenagers are texting while older adults are talking.

According to The New York Times, the numbers come from Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, California who polled students at local high schools. Dr. Joffe is concerned about the anxiety, distraction, falling grades, repetitive stress injury, and sleep deprivation attributed to texting.  Dr. Joffe is not alone in his concern, as physicians and psychologists are wondering how all the texting will affect the users. Teenagers generally have sleep issues and responding to and sending texts throughout the night is going to add to the problem.  Dr. Joffe says parents tend to be less aware of texting than of video games or general computer use and unlimited texting plans often means they are not paying attention to billing details.

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, California, said teenagers have a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm. “Texting can be an enormous tool,” he said. “It offers companionship and the promise of connectedness. At the same time, texting can make a youngster feel frightened and overly exposed.”

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at MIT has studied texting among teenagers in Boston for three years, and believes that it may be changing the way adolescents develop. Adolescence is the time to separate from parents and find peace and quiet to become the person they decide they want to be according to Turkle, and texting hits directly at both those jobs. Instant communications interrupt thoughts, and separation is hard when you are only seconds away from your parents through texting.

Since text messaging is used more than phone calls in all groups up to 45 or older, AT&T has held workshops in Cleveland and Pittsburgh to teach older customers how to use their phones for texting. AT&T spokesman Jamie Carracher said the seniors became excited and were anxious to learn to do things such as text their grandkids. Carracher said that the company attributes the increase in texting to the popularity of unlimited texting plans and cell phones with keyboards. She said that a user with a keyboard device sends 122 percent more texts than users without one.

Rob Enderle a technology analyst said that “It’s less disruptive than using the phone, there’s a lot of places where picking up the phone just isn’t appropriate.” He said that texting does have a problem, it is impersonal and removes a lot of the personality of communications, but he points out it does help solve one problem—the nonstop talker. Texting requires briefness and that prevents people from rambling on.