Originally published 3.16.09
Written by Jesse Muhammad
If you’re a cell phone addict, you probably won’t be able to read this blog post all the way through without responding to a text message from someone at the same time. That’s why you’re smiling now.
But seriously, I was recently told by a friend of mine that he canceled his text messaging plan on his cell phone for the next 30 days because he felt it has impacted his natural ability to dialogue with people in person, impacted his attention span and caused him to stop doing things like calling people frequently and writing properly.
So he’s going on a 30-day Texting Fast. That’s a new one, huh?
He said he got so addicted to texting in abbreviations to so many people that he started noticing that he was more interactive with them through the cell phone than when he saw them in person. So the conversation in person would be short and not as “engaging” as the text messaging.
Then he said he got to the point that he stop making personal calls, even to family members, and even limited them to just text messages. He stop answering their calls and even mentally put certain people on the TEXT ONLY list and pressed ignore on his Treo. Do you have one of those list?
Just like others attribute to the PC, he said he found that his attention span began to decrease. He didn’t enjoy long conversations with people and when he attended social events he wasn’t as interactive as normal but instead would be texting people the whole time on his cell phone….even people in the same room with him instead of going up to talk to them! Have you ever done that?
Lastly, my friend said he has a gift for writing but feels that doing all of those short dialogues via text messaging started impacting his “writing groove and grammatical harmony” as he put it. So he is going to see what happens over this next 30 days.
Question: Can you relate to my friend or do you think it is far fetched? Could you go 30 days without text messaging?
