As a teenager who uses texting a lot (16k sent last month)... here's some thoughts about why this isn't so extreme:<p>1) Texting works like IM for most people. It's a back and forth conversation where each message generally represents one line of conversation. A conversation on IM can span 100s of lines easily; having several long bits of conversation to different people throughout the day quickly adds up even if it is not especially consuming.<p>2) Further, on some plans texting can include other things. Somewhat ironically considering what I said above, Mobile IM on many Verizon phones counts as a text every time a message is sent or received. So if I'm using AIM, MSN, etc on my non-data plan phone, I can rack up text numbers quickly.<p>3) Twitter. I don't use it on my phone, but I know some who do. If you get Twitter texts every time someone you follow updates, you can have a lot of extra traffic being sent. The same goes for Facebook status messages and whatever other traffic can go through a phone.<p>I don't really consider myself a super heavy texter, but it's my main conversation with some people for even longer conversations. I also used about 1200 minutes on the phone; it's not just for texting. But when you're limited to no data plan, and you have a phone that has a default keyboard and so forth (I have an LG Voyager, chosen simply for having the best phone keyboard for me), it can look like a lot.<p>16k is only about 500 messages a day. Check your last IM log.. I looked at one on Skype text chat and it was at 650 from just a few of hours of off and on talking to a nerd friend as he messed with some stuff on his Droid 2.
The numbers for older people are higher than I would've expected as well. 45-54 year olds send an average of 500 or so texts per month? I'm in my late 20s and don't average that (I'm closer to 200). I wonder what the distributions look like; are there a handful of people sending 10,000?
That's over a hundred a day. Bollocks. This "study" has people in their mid thirties sending ten a day, which also seems ridiculous. Some of them, sure, but on average? Nonsense.
This is really surprising. The volume for teens completely blow everyone else out the water. At this rate, they're sending 7 texts per hour ALL day and night, assuming they take 8 hours to sleep.<p>What the hell are these kids talking about?
Wait, what? This can't be accurate. I'm 17, and the heviest texter my age I know sends around 800 a month. Among me and my friends, the average is roughly 30.
Original article from Nielsen, with related charts:<p><a href="http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-teen-mobile-report-calling-yesterday-texting-today-using-apps-tomorrow/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-teen-m...</a>
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.<p>Forcing kids to sit in school all day doesn't result in them paying attention to school. They just text all day.<p>Something needs to change.
That is one text every ten minutes counting a day as being 24 hours. As most people sleep at least eight hours, some ten minutes have two texts sent, that is a highly dubious if not an absolute outright made up claim!
This ties in well with the Scott Adams blog post that came up recently.<p>"Wireless Voice Calls Are Obsolete"
<a href="http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/wireless_voice_calls_are_obsolete/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/wireless_voice_calls_are_o...</a>
This would explain why I have had to wait for a teen to finish texting while they should of been working at a Best Buy, a local ice cream place, and a carnival I took my kids to just in the past month. And in two of the cases they seemed to think it was rude of me to interrupt them.