Texting On the Rise In the US 468
frontwave links to this stat-laden overview of trends in text-messaging among Americans, citing a few of its findings: "The average teen (even including teens without cell phones) sends and receives five times more text messages a day than a typical adult. A teen typically sends or receives 50 text messages a day, while the average adult sends or receives 10. Fully 31% of teens send more than 100 texts a day and 15% send more than 200 a day, while just 8% and 5% of adults send that many, respectively."
Europe (Score:1, Informative)
And back in the Europe this was (became?) trend like 10 years ago.
Of course when you grow up it becomes less and less important and you use other mediums of communication, like actually talking with people instead of taking 5 minutes to reply.
The Actual Report (Score:5, Informative)
It's worth having a read of, there's some rather fascinating demographic info in there that could really make for an interesting chat. Oh, and the report shows that 24% of teens send under 10 messages a day, girls more than boys, older more than younger, generally the same across racial and economic groupings.
Welcome to the year 2000 USA! (Score:4, Informative)
For me in the UK I would prob say this happened around the year 2000 if not before. So this prob means litres, kilograms, meters and ISO paper is just around the corner for the USA soon then :-)
Only-a-decade-behind-dept (Score:5, Informative)
What is this? Was this study commissioned by the "Get Off My Lawn Association" or is the US mobile telecom industry really that far behind the rest of the world? This news really is a decade old; I can recall similar numbers coming out in Ireland and the UK back in 2000.
Despite the absurdity of US telecoms pricing schemes, I still can't believe that texting is still some kind of novel phenomena in the US at this late stage. There are kids in deepest Africa, darkest Peru and the wilds of Connemara who know what a text message is by now. The US baby boomers can't possibly still be ignorant of it can they?
Re:Progress (Score:5, Informative)
It's a much less intrusive form of communication. I can send you a small bit of info (e.g. meet at xxx at y) without interrupting whatever you are doing at the moment.
A phone call generally takes me 30-60 seconds, plus some waiting for the call to connect. A text is much faster (and can be sent to multiple recipients)
It's much more discreet for the sender (can send text from meeting/class/dinner)
It is a lot like email - but generally more available on phones, and with approximately real-time delivery to the recipient's attention. By comparison, a lot of people might not check their email for hours (or even days) at a time.
For a lot of plans, it is also a lot cheaper than voice calling. (in the uk at least, lots of pretty cheap plans come with effectively unlimited texting)
Re:(even including teens without cell phones) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Honest question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Honest question (Score:3, Informative)
The UK had a mobile phone network long before GSM came along and I'm sure the same is true for mainland Europe too.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Linguists to the rescue...Here's an interesting, relatively well-written, and informative read on just that question...
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 [oup.com]
and for the shorter version...
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 [wikipedia.org]
or
review by Melissa Katsoulis in The Sunday Times [timesonline.co.uk]