ON COLLEGE CAMPUS

TEXT MESSAGING CRAZE

By Reena Nadler

You’re sitting in class, coffee in hand and eyes on the board as your professor explains a particularly complex point. And then you hear it. Beep. Quickly, you reach into your bag, hoping no one else has heard and flip open your phone under the table.

It’s a text message from your roommate.

Soon your thumbs are flying as you arrange afternoon plans, sneaking looks left and right to see if anyone notices you’re not paying attention.

Email is the new “snail mail”

Instant messaging—on the Internet and with cell phones—is taking over today’s college campuses. People still talk in person, of course, but to contact someone from a distance (or even from the next room), “IMing” and “texting” are key. Meanwhile, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are also growing rapidly.

New statistics show that, for the first time, email use is dropping among teens in favor of these more instant options. For today’s young people, waiting around while your message sits unopened in someone’s inbox seems as archaic as buying stamps. Even the traditional phone call is losing favor. According to a recent Pew Internet study, teens who go online daily and own a cell phone communicate most often through written messages, and 61 percent of the time, they’re chatting on IM.

Talking about my generation

The experience of college has changed—partly because new communication technologies are available, but also because today’s college students are different. We are a new generation with a new approach to connecting with our peers. In Millennials Go To College, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe explain the generational wave that has been breaking across America’s campuses (see www.LifeCourse.com).

Millennials, born in 1982 and after, are the first generation in history to grow up in an age of digital technology. As a generation, we are intensely social, team-oriented and plugged into our communities—and we expect nonstop interaction with friends in ways that were unimaginable to previous generations of college students.

When our parents were in college, socializing meant getting together in person or maybe talking on the phone. Older generations often comment that young people have become isolated by technology, always attached to the laptop, the iPod and the cell phone. From Millennials’ perspective, they couldn’t be more wrong. Today’s students see text messages, instant messenger and networking sites as crucial components of social life.

Instant trouble?

The abundance of instant communication tools has given our generation an exciting new range of skills, such as multitasking, searching through enormous amounts of information and making quick connections more easily than older generations. But it also raises new challenges. Multitasking, for instance, can hold students back as much as it helps them. College courses tend to require focused reading, in-depth thinking and careful analysis—all of which are harder to accomplish while typing constant messages to friends or checking MySpace profiles.

Then there’s the information leak—not only can we Internet search, others can search for us online. Most networking services include journals and profiles that can be read by people you don’t expect, including school administrators, professors, your parents and potential employers. “Oversharing” online can reflect badly on you, cause embarrassment and even block future opportunities. Of course, personal information that could allow anyone to harm you or steal from you should never be posted, including your address and phone number.

Finally, some students run the risk of forgetting that there’s a real world beyond the virtual one. Instant messaging has its advantages, but college is also a time to work with other students, get involved in campus life and engage in a live social scene. Instead of sitting alone in your room signed onto your computer, try sitting out on the campus green—and you might even consider leaving your cell phone at home.

• 90% of teen-agers report using the Internet, up from 74% in 2000 (Pew Internet and American Life Project study, 2005).

• 75% of teen-agers who go online use instant messenger (Pew study).

• 46% of teens who go online chose instant messaging over email as their preferred method of written communication with friends (Pew study).

• 36% of 13-to-18-year olds have friends whom they’ve never met in person and only “talk to” online (Harris Interactive’s Trends & Tudes, 2006).

• In 2005, more than 500 billion text messages were sent and received worldwide (as reported by Verizon Wireless). By 2010, it is projected to be more than 2.3 trillion.