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Too Much Texting?

The article notes that she averages 14,000 texts per month, and 400-470 texts per day (no news, however, on what Ms. Moore’s phone bill is like…perhaps the $50,000 goes to paying her family’s monthly charges?). The competition is sponsored by LG Electronics Inc.'s mobile-phones division.

 

On the one hand, this would seem a very clever way to take advantage of the near-crack-addiction of teens and young people (the oldest of the 20 competition finalists was 22) to texting. Teens like to text the way toddlers like to watch the same Pixar movies over-and-over-and-over-and-shoot-me-over again. Something in child-adolescent brain at work, but I leave that to whatever Examiner blogger is handling psychiatry.

 

Is this a good thing though? Ms. Moore insists that she still has time for actual face-to-face interaction with friends and family, though how she’s able to do this texting upwards of 500 times a day is beyond me.

 

She also studies for exams with friends “by texting.” I wonder how that works exactly. As the saying goes, if you want to really screw up something, assign it to a committee. But then again, kids seem to be better at multi-tasking than my generation, so if it works, that’s great…though the AP story made no mention of Ms. Moore’s school record or grade point average.

 

Obviously, if you get the AP to cover your story, you’re doing well publicity-wise, so it would seem this competition, now in its third year, has some benefit…though again, no news on whether this competition has actually helped LG’s mobile phone sales…or even if Ms. Moore and her fellow finalists use LG phones.

 

And isn’t there something amiss about having an event that seems to encourage overindulgence? There was a lot of media coverage, for instance, of eating competitions for awhile until people’s attitudes began to change…something inherently wrong about (1) promoting unhealthy activity (eating 200 hot dogs in 15 minutes is okay only if you’re Jabba the Hutt) and (2) celebrating Olympic-caliber gluttony when people across the world are starving.

 

The PR value of such a competition—marathon eating, texting—would seem nebulous at best. And is it really healthy to have kids, their necks  hung downward like wilting plants, eyes riveted to tiny screens, sending messages to friends sitting three yards away half the time?

 

Of particular interest are the comments of competition finalist Jackie Boyd who asserts that texting is especially effective “if it’s an argument” as you “don’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing.” Well, you could TEXT the wrong thing. “And if you don’t want to respond, you can always say, ‘Oh, I didn’t get your text.’” So texting encourages deception, dishonesty? Do we not text when we don’t want to be bothered with having to talk to a person because that involves a give and take and we don’t want to really listen to what the other person has to say, we just want to deliver our message and move on with our singular, self-involved, self-triumphant lives? Sort of like calling after hours so we get the answering machine and can leave our message and not have to deal with the jabber of the other person we don’t really want to talk to in the first place?

 

Well, sometimes.

 

All this technology is changing how we communicate. And this is important to appreciate and understand for public relations, afterall, is nothing more than the varied science of communication—of our clients’ ideas, messages, goals and objectives. Unfortunately, I fear that we are becoming increasingly separate, cynical, and machine-obsessed. Why bother to use our vocal cords when we can just TEXT what we want to say?

 

I’m reminded of an episode of THE SIMPSONS where Homer finds himself in a nursing home—and is absolutely delighted. “All this time,” he quips, “turning over in bed by myself when there were people who could do it for me!”

 

I might be more taken with LG’s texting competition if it were, instead, a fundraiser—people earning dollars for every so many text messages they send—with monies going to education…like field trips to national parks. Or art classes. Or something that doesn’t involve developing RSI (repetitive strain injury) by texting the equivalent of WAR AND PEACE every day.

 

So kids, turn off your cell phones and do something constructive. Like watch TV (kidding...)