Texting Teaches Teens Important Life Skills

by Susan Wagner (Subscribe to Susan Wagner's posts) Dec 12th 2008 11:00AM

Categories: Teens & tweens, Gadgets & Tech

A new study has found that teenagers are sending nearly 10,000 text messages each year -- that's just over 27 a day, in case you're wondering. One third of teens surveyed also confess to watching nearly 50 videos on line each week, in addition to the five hours of television they're watching.

The survey was posted at the social networking site Bebo, and of course targeted kids who are participating in such networks, which probably means it reached out to kids with a higher propensity for heavy technology use. But it still makes you think.

While it's easy to say whoa, all that texting is bad! that's not necessarily the conclusion experts are coming to. Technology, after all, is the future, and learning to manage it responsibly is an important lesson. "Their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world," said Mizuko Ito, one of the lead researchers behind the study, entitled Living and Learning with New Media. "They're learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page." In addition, a study done by the MacArthur Foundation determined that use of social networking sites like Bebo, Facebook and MySpace actually helped young people to learn crucial life skills.

I'm 40, so not a teenager; I send between five and twenty text messages each day, often for work. I have a Facebook account -- again, primarily for work. I make a living on the internet, and I've had to learn the ins and outs of a variety of new techologies as well as the conventions for polite interaction in the virtual age. This generation of teens are light years ahead of my generation, and may very well be better prepared to live, and work, on line.

What do you think -- are teens just wasting their time with all those text messages, or is texting just the new email?

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Comments (2)

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

C.M. 12-14-2008 @ 1:00PM

With all the texting, they are seriously lacking in communication skills. If you're not face to face with someone, you are more likely to say things you otherwise might not say. They are taking computer classes and most people have computers in there home, so they don't NEED texting skills to help them through life, they need to learn how to affectively communicate their feelings and thoughts, a skill that has been lost in this generation.

SM 1-13-2009 @ 3:26PM

It is likely a spot-on statement that "texting is the new email." Its benefit, of course, is its immediacy. The phrase "affectively communicate their feelings and thoughts" has thought-provoking implications, but isn't likely to be "effectively" communicating what C.M. thinks he or she is saying. Our children will pick up the skills they need as they need them, and while they are doing so they will struggle through issues of ethics, manners, and, yes, grammar--whether that last be traditional grammar or txtsp33k. We require formal writing to be that, and we open up casual writing to new styles that enable its spread.

Of all the issues, the "public identity" one is clearly the most challenging one: I hold that if you try to restrain kids from experimentation [with concerned guidance from savvy teachers and other caring adults] you're just holding them back. Do we attempt to do so because we're jealous or because we just don't "get it?"