I’m pretty sure that if not for texting, I wouldn’t hear from my thirty-five year old daughter much at all. She loves me, she misses me, she wants to keep in touch, but email and phone just don’t work for her. So I get the occasional cheery text, or short update, and sometimes we even get a little text-conversation going (I refuse to refer to it as a thread). In an emergency, she will answer the phone if she sees it’s me, but I got word that I was to be a grandma by… text.
I dislike texting intensely. Because it’s phone-tech, it is designed to be intrusive and un-ignorable, but the actual mechanics of communication, letter by letter on a teeny screen and micro-teeny keyboard, are also tedious as heck. (Because predictive text trains AI, mine is turned off, and was even before AI for being intrusive and so frequently wrong). 
The back and forth of texting is stilted, and particularly in groups, gets out of sequence easily. But Millennials and younger people apparently prefer texting, so I grump along mostly in silence.
The reason many young people give for preferring texting is that they can control their content more precisely than they can with a spoken dialogue. They can choose every word, choose whether to use emojis, choose jargon or abbreviations, and how quickly to reply.They also claim that texting lets them control the timing of their communication so they contact friends when convenient for them. (Presumably not so conveniently for the friend, because to not reply to a seen text is apparently rude.) To phone without first asking by text whether the time suits is also apparently rude.
I find these reasons ridiculous as applied to friendly texts (I can tolerate practical texts along the lines of: Running 5 min late, see you soon.) If you’re going to blow up a friendship over the use of a word here or another word there, it wasn’t much of a friendship. If you think emojis are more precise and nuanced than your tone of voice and facial expressions, you delude yourself. To my mind, all the justifications for texting come down to: Communication is hard, good communication harder and even scary. We’re so afraid of each other, we’d rather tiptoe through texting than do the hard work of communication.
I can cite you study after study proving that constant texting reduces cognitive and linguistic abilities as well as productivity, that the hunched over posture we assume when using a smartphone is bad for our health and mood, that the result of all this “wonderful” connective tech is anxiety, short attention spans, more car accidents, smaller vocabularies, and people who won’t order a pizza unless they can do so by text.
I want to put a sign in my yard that smartphones are the new smoking. We have the data warning us that these devices should be approached and used with extreme caution. An IQ is a terrible thing to waste, and a decent mood just as precious. But if I want to communicate with my daughter…
What aspect of taken-for-granted life right now do you think future generations will look back on and shudder over?
Ha! Ok, I am at odds with you on this one, Grace. I much prefer texting to phone calls or emails! It’s interesting to see someone else’s take on this. It’s good to be reminded that my preferences aren’t necessarily others’ preferences.
I’m having a pretty tough week. Covid infection AGAIN, mom in the hospital, recoving from another hurricane decimating my town once again. Please send good vibes (and it’s ok to text them )!
I agree with you Grace! I abhor texting as a routine communication as I consider it rude and lazy. My whole family knows that if they want to contact me, I have a phone and an email that I will respond to. My cell phone sits in the family room all by itself. These days, I don’t even look at my cell phone for days on end, since my parents are gone and I’m no longer working, and we still have a landline (cell service is too iffy where I live).
Several years ago, when we still had to pay extra for texting capability on our phones, one of my nieces texted my mother (whose cellphone was for emergencies only) with Thanksgiving greetings the morning of, even though we were all gathering that afternoon! I laid down the law at that point for everybody. It probably helped that when one of my younger relatives asked why I didn’t respond to a question, I told her that I didn’t see it since I didn’t check. I’m old enough that I spent most of my life not being in constant communication with the world and that is my preferred way of life. Maybe if I had children, I would feel differently but I don’t, and even when I was the contact person for my late parents, I did not use texts. When anybody asks for my number for texting, I simply tell them I don’t text.
I always teased that I was going to be a crochety old lady and I guess I am. I’m sticking to my “no text” policy as long as possible (to the point that I even complained to the Social Security Administration a few years ago when they suddenly required that I accept a text to log in–they added back other options pretty quickly so I’m sure other people also complained that not everybody has texting capabilities).
You’re a nicer person than I am, for sure. As for what will change in the future, I don’t think about it much because I won’t be here and it won’t matter to me. It’s enough to keep up with current events, especially as I’m in despair these days over our future as a country and a world.
You nailed this one Grace. I feel the same. Texting is the poorest form of communication. My dear ones know better than to text me. They need to call or at the very least email me. A text just tells me I’m an after thought.
Oh dear—minority opinion (at least so far) coming. Elder Millennial here, and I am profoundly grateful for texting. Texting allows me to have ongoing open conversations with people I care about. The siblings-and-spouses group is a riot, but also thoughtful, supportive, and there anytime any of us needs anything without the “drop everything you’re doing in the thick of your peak parenting and career lives to take a phone call.” We do that for each other too, but when I see it’s a phone call, I know that Intervention is most likely required. The text thread is an omnipresent reminder that I am loved, needed, and supported—plus niece and nephew pictures! I’m pretty good about calling my parents, but the sibling-and-parent group text on our phones is also fab. My dad has discovered pebbling and is quite good at it. Imagine me plowing through my Wednesday at work when a 35 year-old Farside appears on the family group, followed a few minutes later by an equally hilarious New Yorker cartoon by a sister that riffs both on what Dad sent as well as an inside family joke. Done right, texting can augment a sense of belonging. Can’t create it though.
I turn off my read notifications (most of my age cohort does), and everyone I regularly text, from church friends to colleagues (oh the collegial commiseration that happens via text!) to my retired former boss knows the unspoken rule of texting: if I didn’t reply to your text, it’s because I’m drowning in life. Send help. Or at least, try texting again soon.
My texting buddies are articulate, witty, text me in multiple languages and have taught me words in my own that I’ve had to look up. But the way we tend to text feels a bit more like a real-time email.
I suspect that like so much of the Smartphone/Social media culture, what we’ve got going on here is a problem of what is developmentally appropriate when. Everyone I text with regularly is a highly educated talented writer. That didn’t happen via text, and text isn’t hurting them any (some of them may even be improved by it; my brother in particular has elevated the form to an art).
But here’s the other thing: I teach freshmen in college writing and have been doing for 20+ years (got my first class as a 21 year-old grad student). The level of rhetorical awareness I’m seeing in students now, the appreciation of the nuances of words in context, is far beyond what I saw 20 years ago, and I suspect it’s because so much of their social world happens in written language. Are there downsides? Definitely. Do we need better rules, especially for the under-sixteen crowd? That is manifestly evident. Is it all bad? No.
Oh, also, a few Christmases ago, my siblings and I had a contest: tell stories about Christmas in three emojis and nothing else. It was superlative: wildly creative, hilarious, and occasionally highly inappropriate. Or maybe we’re just too easily entertained.
What do I think will horrify my daughters when they’re my age that I don’t bat an eye at now? Much as it pains me to say it, probably things like air travel (we do that as a family a lot), meat consumption (don’t do that so much), and so many other daily things that are making life on our planet less and less tenable for all, but especially the poorest among us.
Hmmmm..I don’t really have that problem as I don’t have a cell phone (GASP) and, frankly, I don’t miss it. I did have one but got a real hassle trying to change the account into my name when my husband died so just cancelled the whole thing. I did get a “burner” phone for emergencies but haven’t activated it yet. I do have a “landline” which is actually VOIP (Voice over internet protocal for those who don’t know what it means) and that seems to be enough for now. I find that e-mail works just fine for whatever I need as I only have a couple of people outside of my local area that I’m in contact with. I did use text when I had the cell but don’t really care that it is now unavailable. It isn’t that I’m a technophob (I think that’s a word) I just don’t feel the need for a cell.
There’s a lot our kids are shuddering over already, the size of our house for starters. Owning more than one set of dishes, eating canned & frozen fruit & veggies, collectively electing a president our daughter calls Agent Orange…
I think photos are something we take for granted that future generations will look back and be sad about. I have family photos from the early 1900’s, like 1910 or so, plus lots of photos from the early 1930’s when my dad was a little sprout. Nowadays, photos are all digital and on our phones or our computers or on the cloud. I saw some stat that only a teeny tiny percentage of all photos are actually printed now. Imagine what society will have collectively lost when all photos are digital and therefore become lost, in a non-accessible format, and so forth.
My granddaughter texts me her news. I’d rather a text than nothing at all!
Future generations may be horrified at gasoline engine vehicles with manual transmissions. I’ll keep mine, thank you very much!
When I was a kid, parents said the same things about television. Sigh…
Late to this thread, as always. I’m around your age and when my son got his first cell phone, it was a good way to keep up with a kid who would not be interested in a conversation with mom. Your experience of texting is the opposite of how it started. Texting is supposed to happen at your convenience. It’s supposed to go like this: You text when you have a minute. You read it when you have a minute. You reply when you have a minute. Those three stages can be hours apart if you are busy in Real Life. You’re at work, you’re making dinner, you’re working out, whatever. That’s the point about texting: nothing here is urgent, it can wait until you have a minute. There is no need to drop what you are doing to read and answer.
A good way to compare this experience is to ask ourselves: how many of us can ignore a ringing phone? Growing up, long distance was expensive, and if a call came, somebody was either dead or in the hospital. It was important. We answered it.
There are people who trained themselves to ignore phones, especially after answering machines came along. My sister can ignore a phone, but I can’t (“It might be important!”), and neither could my mom. When my sister (over 50 at the time) had cut herself on something, mom was bandaging her up, and in the middle of this, mom’s cell rang … and she answered it, lol. Sister is still mad about it, lol. And on the other hand, the call could have been about my sister’s college student child lying in a ditch. Urgent things are always going to happen by voice. Deciding where four people are meeting for lunch isn’t urgent – AND would be less effective if done in one-to-one phone calls. I don’t like to interrupt a person’s day to demand that they share a moment with me. By text … it’s up to them when it’s convenient to answer.