Texting // Current

The Greatest Generation (of Networkers)

A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal's office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that's when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student's fingers moving on his lap.

He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.

"It was a subconscious act," says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. "Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It's compulsive."

Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can "hyper-socializing" students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?

Some argue they can accomplish a great deal: This generation has a gift for multitasking, and because they've integrated technology into their lives, their ability to remain connected to each other will serve them and their employers well. Others contend that these hyper-socializers are serial time-wasters, that the bonds between them are shallow, and that their face-to-face interpersonal skills are poor.

"The unspoken attitude is, 'I don't need you. I have the Internet,'" says P.M. Forni, the 58-year-old director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which studies politeness and manners. "The Net provides an opportunity to play hide-and-seek, to say and not say, to be truthful and to pretend. There is a lot of communication going on that is futile and trivial."

That's far too harsh an assessment, says Ben Bajarin, 32, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies, a consulting firm in Campbell, Calif. He argues that because young people are so adept at multimedia socializing, their social skills are actually strengthened. They're good at "managing conversations" and getting to the pithy essence of an issue, he says, which will help them in the workplace.

While their older colleagues waste time holding meetings or engaging in long phone conversations, young people have an ability to sum things up in one-sentence text messages, Mr. Bajarin says. "They know how to optimize and prioritize. They will call or set up a meeting if it's needed. If not, they text." And given their vast network of online acquaintances, they discover people who can become true friends or valued business colleagues—people they wouldn't have been able to find in the pre-Internet era.

It's hard to quantify whether the abbreviated interchanges of text messaging are beneficial in the workplace, but this much is known: Young workers spend more time than older workers socializing via their devices or entertaining themselves online. In a 2008 survey for Salary.com, 53% of those under age 24 said this was their primary "time wasting" activity while at work, compared to just 34% for those between ages 41 and 65.

More schools are now allowing students to use their cellphones between classes, or even as a learning tool in the classroom. Some teachers are having students text their friends during classes to share feedback on what's being taught. The mantra among educators who try to be enlightened: It's no longer about attention span. It's about attention scope—being able to concentrate on many things at once.

(Much more to the article, I shortened it a bit.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704746304574505643153518708.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyleA 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the... more

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The Age of New Literacy

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it's also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids... more

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Drunk driving could be 'safer' than texting while driving, study says

Everyone knows the law, though few of us abide. But the studies are rolling in and they're saying texting while driving is not only illegal -- it’s dangerous.

Sure, you might object to the evidence: there have been few conclusive empirical studies about the dangersof texting while behind the wheel, but if it’s important enough for Obama to convene a national summit about it, perhaps it’s worthy of a closer look.

Texting, also known as SMS (short message service), refers to the 160-character messages sent and received on modern mobile phones.

A Car and Driver study released in June, although not the most academic (because of its very small sample size), nonetheless revealed results that will make you doubt your ability to text and drive carefully at the same time.

The study measured the reaction times of two different male test subjects (ages 22 and 37) texting while driving and again while intoxicated, to compare the two. When a red light mounted on the windshield at eye level lit up (like a car’s brake lights), the driver was to hit the brakes. A data logger recorded the test data. (See the article here for more of the study’s technical methods.)

The 22-year-old subject’s slowest reactions times driving at 35 mph while reading a text caused him to travel an extra 21 feet (more than a car length) beyond his baseline reaction time before hitting the brakes, and an extra 16 feet while writing a text. While reading a text and driving at 70 mph, the same subject traveled about 31 extra feet while typing. In comparison, he traveled half that -- 15 extra feet -- while drunk.

The 37-year-old subject wracked up far worse scores. Even during his bestreaction time while reading or texting, the subject traveled an extra 90 feet beyond his baseline performance. In the worst case, he went 319 feet farther down the road. That's almost the length of a regulation football field.

Now, this is not merely a case of ageism -- the study is really just trying to show that no matter what age, even while using a phone familiar to them, and with no traffic, road signals, or pedestrians, drivers are seriously distracted when they are typing out a tiny 160-character message.

You might feel safe knowing that you only text when fully stopped at red lights. But in a Jan. 1 article about new California laws that issue fines to drivers who text while driving, CHP spokeswoman Fran Clader reminded us that you can still get a citation even if your car isn’t moving.

The Car and Driver study also kindly reminds us that the results are by no means advocating drunk driving. “[The intoxicated results] only look better because the texting results are so horrendously bad.”

Let’s not wait until the accidents caused by texting while driving increase and force us to see that this phenomenon is as dangerous and unacceptable as driving while under the influence.

Choose safety first: Try new hands-free texting services, a nifty Bluetooth, or just plain pulling over to text.Everyone knows the law, though few of us abide. But the studies are rolling in and... more