Inspirational Passage of the Day
On top of texting being such a drain on face-to-face communication, texting can be extremely dangerous. One of the biggest examples is Anthony Weiner. Weiner accidently sent a picture of himself on Twitter to a girl. This incident was dubbed the Weinergate because he decided to not only stay in the race as a candidate for mayor afterwards but he was still married to his wife. Weiner ended up resigning as congressmen in 2011 and then ended up dropping out as a candidate for mayor (Bruinius). The whole Weinergate incident is something that happens very commonly. Text messages are sent to the wrong people all the time and it’s impossible to stop a message once it has been sent. Another example of how dangerous texting is how addictive texting can be. Some people look at their phone every couple of minutes for a text message. This addiction can cause many problems when doing things such as taking a test or driving. One of the things that are being studied right now is a psychological effect of people who use their phone very often. They can sometimes feel their phone vibrate against their leg even though there wasn’t a vibration at all.
Even though texting can be very dangerous and requires a lot of responsibility, there isn’t evidence saying that texting is actually a bad thing. According to a study on fatal car accidents in teens, there was insufficient evidence that said teens are actually affected by limited cell phone use while driving. There was evidence that it reduced evidence for all ages, but the newer generation of teens who grew up around technology was inconclusive. The number of crashes that are cell phone related are underreported and often ignored whereas driving while intoxicated is always recorded (Lim). The future needs to revolve around how important texting and other activities are during a car crash.
Even though texting was inconclusive in areas such as driving, texting can also affect literacy and vocabulary. Everything in the texting language is shortened to fit the 160 character length that text messages have. Abbreviations are very common and replace other words because text messages are supposed to be short, sweet, and to the point. According to a study on the effects of text messaging on literacy, it differs between age groups and intelligence between people (Verheijen). The idea that reading could affect literacy in a bad way is a rather strange occurrence.
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