As Americans look back at the past decade this coming New Year, they will probably see the faces of more friends and family members than in years past. Drastic changes in the realm of social media in the last decade allowed more families to stay in touch with distant relatives through texting. Entire families are catching the cellular wave and staying in touch via text messaging. Children are catching the wave as well. At young ages they tune into see what their friends and families are doing. They want to stay in touch, too.
Our nation is now closer than ever thanks to the myriad of texting applications available to manage our personal and business affairs. Texting applications like Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Messenger, and of course, the handy cellular phone/ PDA device make life easier.
Goodbye, snail mail. We no longer need special time set aside for correspondence. If you’re away from home you text on your cellular, and when you get home you text from your computer. Texting allows family and friends, who may be far away, to stay in much closer contact than ever before imagined. Staying in closer contact with family members and friends is a good thing.
The ‘texting nation’ however has its drawbacks. We interact with more people, more often. We squeeze mini-conversations into our bathroom breaks and break 10 word sentences down into 5 letters in order to save time. Most of the English language is now broken down into acronyms for the purpose of instant messaging.
While texting is not causing social disconnection, it is causing other problems. Language problems. Quite similar to the big Ebonics scare of the 1990’s, the language of the next generation is likely to be T9 or a similar qwerty language.
