Author: Elizabeth Cutler
I used to lament the decline of handwritten notes and personal conversations whose importance in our lives has been usurped by that of e-mails and voicemail. Now I lament the decline of normal phone calls, largely replaced by frenzied text messaging, and a time when handheld PDAs permeate the classroom environment.
I understand and even appreciate the convenience of text messaging, but students seem to have let its novelty blind them to how annoying and expensive it can be to receive messages when you do not choose to have a cell phone plan with unlimited texts and when a simple phone call would actually be a lot more effective. I can’t stand it when people insist on texting back and forth for 20 minutes when they could have answered the question, made the plans, or solved the problem in a five-minute conversation over the phone.
I have actually had the experience of answering a series of questions for a friend about an assignment via text messages that he/she (three cheers for identity protection) initiated – then when I finally called to just talk about it, my friend said “Hey, I’m too busy to talk now.” What?!? Too busy to figure the matter out in three minutes but not too busy to punch out text message after text message to piece together an answer at fifteen cents per message on my end. Those messages add up and it’s incredible how easily people punch out a text message without any regard for the fact that its recipient is not interested in making financial alterations to accommodate everyone else’s careless, voiceless automatic messaging.
Even more shocking is how blasé students are about whipping out their iPhones and Blackberries in class – what, do they think that the professor thinks it’s a calculator? In an English literature class? I have actually witnessed students scrolling through Facebook news feeds and e-mail with the PDA in plain view of other students and the professor. They often even show something to their neighbor and share a chuckle over something, probably an extremely important wall post or a PerezHilton.com update. I do not say this out of unadulterated concern for my peers’ listening and learning in class; rather, I say this out of pure shock that my fellow Oxy classmates would be so disrespectful as to wave their disregard for their education in front of their professors’ faces in the form of shiny, digitalized flags. It’s nice that your parents bought you a Blackberry so that you can keep up with your highly important e-mails and business communications – hey, every corporate CEO has one, so obviously a college junior does too, right?
Right.
That’s the rant side of this piece, but constant text messaging on phones and PDAs has gotten in the way of safety as well. Concrete research on the issue is still nascent stages, but as people normalize text messaging into an assumed part of everyday life, they get into the habit of doing it while driving. I’ve been a passenger in a car with drivers who think that a second here and a second there staring at the cell phone screen is okay. It’s not. Accidents happen when people are not paying attention and I’m hard-pressed to explain how someone can read and reply to a text message while also steering a vehicle that has the power to kill when it collides with another. Driving is a responsibility that should not be taken with the lightness of a nonchalant text message. Phone records demonstrate that the engineer of the train that crashed in Chatsworth in September was sending and receiving text messages mere moments before the collision. Twenty-five people died and more than 130 were injured in the crash. If that does not sober you up to the realities of technology as it pervades our lives, then I don’t know what will.
I agree that texting is convenient and easy (sort of) – it just concerns me that we are so tickled by the novelty of communicating without ever raising a voice that we will forget how to actually communicate. I haven’t even touched on concerns of educators and social scientists that the frequency of text message use among children will eventually contribute to the deterioration of their command of the written word. Like so many in things in life, I hope that you will consider using texting and PDAs in moderation. Otherwise, I guess I will just C U L8er.
Elizabeth Cutler is a senior Politics major. She can be reached at ecutler@oxy.edu.
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