Txt2txt = fewr face2face chats
- posted: 16 Oct. 2007
- scrollnews@byui.edu
Wake up and smell the SMS. Phone calls are out and T9 is taking over. This causes many people to ponder the loss of face-to-face or even voice-to-voice communication.
Since December of 2005, text messaging has nearly doubled across the globe, increasing from 9.7 billion messages to 18.7 billion in one year, according to the International Association for Wireless Telecommunications.
College students make up a large percent of the texting population. About 63 percent of Americans ages 18 to 27 text message, according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project Survey released in 2005.
It is no longer a toy for teenagers. Parents across the country have begun to use text messaging to get in touch with their kids when they know phone calls will be ignored.
“I was not at all into it at first,” said Rainy Premont, the mother of one BYU-Idaho student. “I was introduced to it by [my kids].”
T9 refers to a method of text messaging in which the phone’s dictionary predicts words so people can text more quickly. “I learned T9 from a friend of my daughter’s mother,” Premont said. “She said, ‘This is the way the kids do it. It’s much faster.’”
Using SMS (or short message service) proves highly efficient for many people on the go. It is effective when phone calls are inappropriate, but texts are not.
“It’s just nice when you can’t have a long conversation or when you don’t really want to talk to someone,” said Arielle Koenig, a sophomore studying music.
But do some text so much that they put communication in person on hold?
“The negative side I see frequently is people texting long-distance contacts when they have a real [person] standing next to them and there is no face-to-face communication because they have been put on hold to ‘text’ a different relationship,” said Susan Grant, professor in the Communication Department.
Miscommunication is identified by many as a common problem during text conversations.
“If a guy is dating a girl and she bails out [by means of texting], you don’t know if she really has other plans or if she’s not interested,” said Chris Wright, a senior studying business finance.
But not everyone feels that it is a negative form of communication.
In a recent poll of 100 BYU-Idaho students, 32 percent estimated that they have between one and three text conversations per day, and about 57 percent estimate that they have more than three conversations.
Twenty-seven percent of students estimated that they engage in 10 or more texting conversations per day.
“You can do it in class, in the library, while you’re talking to other people, or even in the two seconds it takes your date to get in the car,” said Brett Blodgett, a sophomore studying business management. 
