The latest installment in the “Modern Technology Causes Everything Bad” saga comes from the New York Times, where an article describes mobile phones in a tone somewhere between invading aliens and the omnipresent evil from a Stephen King novel. Texting is being blamed for everything from depression to poor grades, because there’s absolutely no other reason teenagers would suddenly start acting differently.
The article describes baffled parents absolutely unable to deal with these mobile phones. After all, these parents only bought the phones, paid for the contract, and inherited the duty of actually raising the children. One brave parent in the story took the bold stand of limiting her daughter to five thousand texts a month (we wrote that in words so you’d know it wasn’t a typo). Five thousand a month! That’s not a limit, that’s a syndrome!
But what is a parent to do? Other than, you know. Parent.
(That’s also a verb, in case – as is becoming clear – some people need reminding.)
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2 Comments
thanks for this interesting post, thumbs up.
While I agree some of the over-texting is nuts, 5,000 a month is not actually THAT many text messages. It’s 166 messages per day. With many phones like the iPhone making SMS look like chat, that’s pretty easy. I don’t have very many friends (and I’m 25) and I generally hit around 2000 messages a month, but this month I have a new best friend who loves to text and I’ll surely be close to 5,000 – I did over 500 one day a few days ago.
On the other hand my minute use has dropped a ton, including free minutes (N/W and Mobile to Mobile) I expect to be under 1000 minutes this month, total…