If you watch your kids these days you will see they use their mobile phone quite a bit. No they really use it quite a bit. Examining our last mobile bill I saw my teenage daughter had sent and received over 4000 text messages in one month. Having talked with her about this she told me it was nothing special. Nothing special! 4000 messages. I did not ask to see them but I can imagine. Looking into this apparently teenagers with mobiles each send and receive 2,272 text messages a month on average, Nielsen Mobile says.

Personally I believe all that mindless chit chat (how much information can be conveyed in 140 characters – even including ‘txt speak’?) can’t be good for her. Recently I heard about a book called:

‘How the digital age stupefies you Americans and Jeopardizes our future’.

I will buy a copy of this book and review here at some point soon. The author, Mark Bauerlein states:

‘unable to read nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, gestures, posture and other silent signals of mood and attitude. Unlike phones, text messaging doesn’t even allow transmission of tone of voice or pauses’

Personally I think that’s why kids like it so much. They can go inside themselves and use their vivid imaginations to interpret those seemingly meaningless text messages. What do you think? How has text messaging affected communication in your family, if at all? I am simply making a fuss about nothing?