Text a Little Less and Think a Little More
A. If you"ve suspected lately that your family"s mobile-phone bill is driven entirely by your 15-year-old, you are probably right. A recent Nielsen report shows that children aged 13 to 17 average an surprising 3,417 text messages a month—some 45 percent of all text messages. This breaks down to seven texts "every waking hour," or roughly one every 8 1/2 minutes. But those who look at this data and worry that young people are over-texting may be asking the wrong question. The more important concern may be not the amount, but the function. Many observers argue that the social world of teenagers and even young adults is nowadays largely constituted by text messaging.
B. Certainly a principal reason cited by many teens for their use of texting is that it is fun. In some surveys, young people reported that they prefer texting to conversation. And "prefer" may be too weak a word. Many young people, when not allowed to text, become anxious and nervous.
C. In recent years, there has been no shortage of reports on television about researchers who say they have found teens addicted (上瘾的) to their mobile phones. Perhaps a better way to view the data is as an illustration of how mobile phones in general, and texting in particular, have taken over the experiential world of the young. An economist might expect that teens deprived of texting would simply substitute another method of communication—talking, for instance. As it turns out, a significant minority will not. They will behave instead, researchers report, the way people do when deprived of human contact.
D. The phone, in other words, is not merely a tool through which teens keep in touch with friends. It is the technology that defines their social circle. If they cannot text someone, that person may as well not exist. Still, I am not criticizing the technology itself. Like most people of all ages these days, I find texting far too convenient to ignore—although, to be sure, my usually send two or three texts a day, not seven an hour.
E. The trouble is that texting arose suddenly, not gradually: Originally included in mobile phones as a tool to enable service providers to send advertising e-mails to their customers, it actually came to the U.S. later than most of the industrialized world. David Mercer, in his 2006 book "The Telephone: The Life Story of a Technology," suggests that the popularity of the practice rose sharply when viewers were urged to text their votes for the winner on such television programs as "American Idol".
F. This break from past practice was so radical that adults had no opportunity to work out from their own experience reasonable bounds for the young. And so the young, unbounded, freely created their own world, from which the old are largely excluded. Fears of what young people might be like if left free to design the world have long been with us: Think "Lord of the Flies," "A Clockwork Orange" or "Children of the Com." That imponderable (无法估量的事物) I leave for others to weigh. I don"t believe that over-texting will create dangerous psychopaths (精神病患者). But it might create something else.
G. Heavy texting has been linked to sleep deprivation among the young, evidently because they somehow feel compelled to respond, even in the middle of the night. Researchers have found connections between texting and many other things. A 2006 study by James E. Katz of Rutgers University, perhaps the leading academic expert on mobile-phone use, has found that young people have trouble giving up their phones, even for a short time. Most were unable to make it through a two-day experiment designed to discover what they would do without their phones.
H. On the other hand, if appropriately used, texting might help get rid of the weird and rude etiquette (礼仪；规矩) of the mobile phone, in which, for no reason but the technology"s existence, it is the recipient (接受者) of the call who is somehow required to make an excuse if not free to answer. Texting remind people of an earlier, less demanding model of communication, in which response was at the convenience of the respondent. It was, and is, known as letter writing. There may actually be advantages in the use of phones for a purpose other than conversation. The sudden increase of phone apps may help children learn. (It may also lead to a new digital divide between those with lots of apps on their phones and those without.) And for those who are worried that constant mobile-phone use by the young might lead to cancer, texting—in which the phone is nowhere near the ear—is obviously an improvement.
I．The larger problem with texting involves neither the physical nor the mental health of our growing army of young texters. My worry is that the ubiquity (普遍存在) of texting may accelerate the decline of what our struggling democracy most needs: independent thought. Indeed, as texting crowds out other activities, it must inevitably crowd out inactivity—and there lies a danger. For inactivity and thinking are closely linked. By inactivity, I mean doing nothing that occupies the mind: time spent in reflection. Bertrand Russell wrote an excellent essay on this subject, titled "In Praise of Idleness" (also the title of the collection in which the essay is most readily found). Russell"s point is that when the rest of the world thinks we are idle, the brain, if properly trained, is following its own path. Only then, he contends, are we truly thinking. The rest of the time we are analyzing and reacting, but our thoughts are then determined by responses to the thoughts of others. Unless we spend time in reflection—in idleness—we can never truly think thoughts of our own. The sudden increase of phone apps may be beneficial to children"s study.