Who are you texting to?

Texting. A typical way of having a conversation now days that doesn’t consist of using a house phone, it requires using a cell phone and typing with your keypads to communicate with one another. All though it’s nice texting to friends and family during class or meetings, if you don’t get caught, but what is the point of texting? Unless you’re a fast typer, it takes a few minutes to type down something to someone when you can say the same thing you where going to type someone in a few seconds. Why do texters text instead of calling each other? Isn’t that the purpose owning a cell phone, to call? According to an online article, “Teens text a lot, Adults worry” by John M. Grohol, PsyD Founder & Editor-in-Chief of the website psychcenteral.com, he wrote down that “Texting is the next generation’s of telephone conversation” as the title of one of the sections of the article.

            According to an article, “The psychology of texting ,The shaping of the new language”  Sunday, April 4, 2010, by  Tim Speciale, BA Psychology, “there was a study done by two gentlemen named Crispin Thurlow and Alex Brown of the University of Washington-Department of Communication utilized 159 college freshmen and Cardiff University (Wales, UK) and analyzed 544 individual text messages for 1.) Message Length 2.) Main linguistic content, such as actual text, or emoticons, and abbreviations”. After the study Thurlow and Brown found that only 23% of texts where friendship maintenance, 17% were salutary, and 15% were plans to meet. The other 45 % consist of favors, romantic, sexual, and chain messages.

            To the texters, why do they text instead of calling? After getting a chance to speak some texters, only a few of them brought up a good point and they stated that; “It helps keep there conversation private instead of talking out loud for other people to hear.” It makes perfect sense that they rather text then call, is that the only reason or is there more to it?