Texting . . . texting . . . texting.

For the past several weeks, I've been reading much about and seeing alot on TV about the fact that "texting" is on the decline, and if you have teenagers, you may find that statement absurd. The following article was edited from NPR, which produced a segment ( by Lynn Neary ) which made the following points:

• For the first time ever, traditional texting — through your cell phone — has dropped in Great Britain. ( decreased by 7 billion last year) 
• Instead, people in the U.K. will send around 300 billion instant messages in 2014. That's the kind of messaging that requires an app and uses the Internet. Old-fashioned texting is only expected to account for about 140 billion messages.

For the first time ever, traditional texting — the kind you do through your cell phone provider — has dropped in Britain. That's according to the annual technology predictions report from Deloitte, which reported that the number of text messages passed around by Brits decreased by 7 billion last year.

 

David Gerzof Richard (a media and marketing professor at Emerson College) tells NPR that people are increasingly using apps to send messages. He proposes several reasons why:

• You pay for texts from your cell phone provider, but with instant messaging services, like Facebook and Snapchat, the app is free and you're not billed for your messages.
• You can do more with instant messages: For example, you can set a time limit for how long messages on Snapchat can be seen; you can send audio and video
• You don't have to worry about phone numbers: most apps don't need them. 

"That's a nice thing about where this is all moving to, the intersection of social and mobile," Richard says. "You can fire up an app, connect it to your Facebook, and all of a sudden you're able to pull in all of your contacts from Facebook and you never have to worry about the phone number. It looks like we're starting to move in a direction where the younger generation isn't thinking in terms of phone numbers, but in terms of usernames and handles."

And so NPR says, "Where young people go, their elders will follow: The report also predicts that people over 55 will be buying smart phones at the quickest rate this year. Richard says that will drive even more people to instant messaging."

"Texting really is just about a 20-year-old technology, and we're talking about it declining already," Richard says. "These are sort of the cycles that we're seeing in technology development."

From All Tech Considered

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