I conducted a survey with people of different age ranges asking a series of questions about texting. A …show more content…
Phone calls are loud and not private. With today’s life and everyone is so go go go, texting is preferred due to the benefit of not needing your full attention. As the sender this is also a benefit because you do not want to interrupt the receiver during an inconvenient time. During a phone call, however, both people have to be there and provide their full attention. When texting, you can answer when it is convenient for you. Texting also allows you to multitask. It is hard to do other things while you are on the phone with someone, unless you want to be rude and not give them the attention they deserve. A down side to phone calls is that you can get swept up in small talk, which can be time consuming. When you text instead there is less of a chance of small talk and more of a chance to get a direct answer about something. If you need to relay a message to multiple people it is quicker to send a mass text message instead of calling each individual person. Text messaging also provides you a way to keep a record of conversations. This is helpful for remembering events and directions without having to locate a …show more content…
We go to bed while on our phones. When we wake up, the first thing we do is check our phone. Do we have any missed texts? How about Facebook notifications? When we are in the bathroom, on our phones. When we are driving, on our phones (though we shouldn’t be). When we are in line somewhere, on our phones. Even when we are with family and friends socializing, on our phones. Our society is clearly addicted to our phones. As technology is advancing, so are our phones. We are so quick to try and get the latest model, even if it is basically the same as the previous. Are we even properly socializing if we basically only do so via text? As we know, social interactions are necessary to our development as a whole. We seem to be doing a lot less interacting. While even out with friends we are often not engaging with them. Most will sit at a table for twenty minutes or more with friends and not engage in conversation, simply because they are engrossed with their phone. How will this affect our social skills? Many studies suggest that the overuse of technology hinders how we handle spontaneous social interactions. Many, especially the new generations who grew up with all this technology, don’t know how to handle face to face conflict. Cell phones are used as an avoidance strategy. There is also the issue of being able to initiate interactions, as in small talk. This is worrisome because this may affect the ability to hold a job