Kids and texting: Shooting arrows around corners
I don’t know how you even count such things, but one prediction states that in 2011 the world will send seven trillion—nope, I have to write it out: 7,000,000,000,000—text messages. Ah, the world communicated in text. I remember when I was working as a medical/technical journalist in the 90s and my field shifted to written communications. I spent a lot of time interviewing physicians and scientists by phone. I would record these conversations and then write a transcript. But at some abrupt point, I started using this tool called email. I would type up questions and the interviewee, sometimes a prominent person in that medical field, would peck out responses.
I liked that. I enjoy writing. I type fast. This not only improved my efficiency as a journalist, but I felt empowered by these textual dealings. The business of my life had been converted to a textual environment, where I was good.
Nowadays lots of people are fast-typing users of the written word. Texting. IM messages. Twitter. Facebook chats. We’re typing away, for work and play.
These scribes are increasingly younger, and, in addition, youngsters’ use of texts is by most measures growing. Children keep in touch with their parents via ephemeral textual strands. It can be a handy, convenient, sometimes sweet way to stay linked. But the increased peer-to-peer textual interaction among kids is often altogether different, and “sweet” is seldom the word to describe it.
Sure, it’s not just kids who are naughty. Plenty of adults are harassing (cyber) and stalking (cyber) and engaging in all kinds of other bad e-behaviors. But what kids do via e-texts often amazes me. They bash. They bully. They gang up. Even when they are not being mean, the messages are astonishingly vapid. “Heeeyyy” is a typical communication. That’s it: “Heeeyyy.” This is lower on the value scale than even small talk about the weather. Nothing productive is going on in some big chunk of that 7 trillion messages for the younger crowd.
Yeah, there have always been bullies and meanies. (One day, I’ll tell you of my dealings with a bully I’ll call Mack.) But digital tech changes the game. Lots of virtual ink has been spilt about the peculiar dynamics of electronic communications. What is it about e-messages that enables such odd behavior? For instance, why is it that kids who were getting along just fine in person at 3:00 pm can hop on the InterWeb and start insulting each other textually two hours later?
Writing has always changed the role of communicator and audience — thus leading Plato to cast a wary eye on writing long ago. But the blip of e-text disrupts the sender-receiver roles in ways that render that relationship strikingly more unequal, and some feel make it more impersonal, than we’ve perhaps ever been accustomed to.
Part of the problem is that the receiver role may remain static. Receiving a negative text can elicit similar responses as receiving a negative face-to-face comment. It can hurt your feelings or make you mad. It can make you worried or scared. It can give you nightmares.
But the sending role is now much different. Writing, and, often, just as importantly, delivering the e-text are completely different experiences from many other kinds of communication, certainly oral but even written. Sending e-texts is nothing — a transient experience. Send it to the stark characters of an addressee: “Warnock, Scott.” Off it goes. No stamp. No eye contact. Nothing but a few clicks.You can toss off a mean comment or a threat or any old thing.
Add the permanence of e-communications, that after a message is launched it floats in the ether to finally drift onto a server where it embeds, like, forever.
This easy-to-send/just-as-hard-to-receive/stay-around-forever environment is difficult for big people. How can kids possibly manage it? When I frame it this way, it seems obvious that most kids are not ready for this world. They have a new way to say but without equivalent scaffolding to managing these new utterance modes. They’re kids. They have still-developing frontal lobes, which thus limits their understanding of consequences and inhibits, well, inhibition. (It’s why we don’t try them as adults for crimes.)
So that Edward Bulwer-Lytton knew what he was talking about with the pen being mightier than the sword — because the worst havoc we can wreak is often that for which we are not accountable. You can see the effect of your sword, however bloody its swings. But we could always dodge the consequences of our messages, and now with digital tech tools, we can spread our communication with complete personal disconnect. Kids, still developing the real sense that there are other people out there, can spread some anger or hate, and then walk away and have a Nutter Butter.
Forget the sword for a moment. The use of these texts is often is like shooting an arrow blindly around a corner. For the shooter, there may not even be intent to hurt. But tell that to the kid with the arrow in her chest.
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Ah, email muscle’s at their infancy. I see this as an extension of something we as adults have been privy to for a long time now. We’ve all seen (sorry, read) email from senders, sometimes even from friends and family, that are filled with much more venom than would ever be delivered in person. That electronic veil seems to be the bane of a certain amount of our civility.
I hope that as our kids grow and develop their set of ethics as it pertains to communication they keep in mind the lessons that we constantly teach. I hope they remember to apply the lessons even when they can’t see or hear the person to whom they are “talking”.
I suppose the cliche’ that “with great power comes great responsibility” could apply to even the smallest of texts sent between two teens. The power to so easily send, uninvited, an acidic barb to anyone means that maybe an extra minute be spent considering that just because you can do it doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Unlike us old fogeys, these kids will have spent most of their lives with this technology. I hold out hope that by the time the 7,000,000,000,001st text is sent they will have figured out how to intigrate into a wholy civil way of communicating.
Thanks for enlightening more parents to, as I call it, ‘mobile bullying’. They don’t even have to log onto an email accout anymore like the way they had to when they became an email ‘cyber bully’. But my question to you is, where is the accountability? We are talking about kids. They are supposed to make mistakes and learn from them. We can’t place blame on the child without first looking at the parent. I doubt many 8-year-olds have gone to Verizon and opened an account on their own. No, their cell phone is most times tied to the parents contract. Why isn’t the parent limiting or viewing texts that they send. And God forbid, take the cell away if it is being used as a bullying tool. If a child is ‘mobile bullying’ then it must be said that the parent is an accessory.
OMG, can’t type anymore TTYL.
PS…You should be really upset that OMG & LOL have become official dictionary entries! WTWCT?
Wow. If you wrote a book, I would buy it and read it cover to cover. Ok, now I’m just kissing your Asdfjkl;
I’m not really sure why this particular writing struck me in an emotional way. I was reading merrily along and thinking how the immediacy of texting and email has likely resulted in unnecessary harm. Throw-away “issues” surely now are resulting in friendships lost, feelings hurt and histories completely re-written.
In the old days, a letter might be written – BY HAND – re-read, crumpled up and tossed in the trash. (certainly not recycled, but I digress) The writer realized the folly of his words before he licked the send button and sent his message into the blue box for delivery. He was able to take a deep breath and put some perspective on the situation and perhaps realize that this minor transgression wasn’t worth creating a big to-do.
Billy Anstey once ran over me with his bicycle when I was 11. He and I were buddies and for a long time inseparable. Every day we walked home from Sacred Heart School together, up Thomas Ave., he to his house (Bednarek’s) and I to mine (Lojek’s). By the time I snacked and changed, he was riding his tandem bike down my sidewalk. He wouldn’t even stop for me – I’d just run out and hop on the back seat and off we’d go for the afternoon. It was Mayberry at its finest.
Then he ran me over.
Goofing around, showing off, chasing me down and running me over cruelty that was unforgivable. I vowed NEVER to be his friend again and tried my best to ignore him. EVERY DAY he’d stop at my house and my mother would urge me to go outside and talk to him. Drip, drip, drip, he wore me down and I finally relented.
With a big smile on my face.
And we were off, riding and swerving and laughing the afternoon away, our bond intact.
Today maybe not so much.
Today perhaps my anger causes the damaged party to fire off a no-holds-barred barrage of textplitives that render the relationship DOA.
Forever.
No week at LBI together.
No pick-up baseball games.
No “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with a couple of neighborhood girls.
No memories, no laughs and now, no tears.
For our kid’s sake, I surely hope I’m wrong.