Texting May Be Taking a Toll

BY Katie Hafner

They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.

“That’s one every few minutes,” he said. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”

The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”

Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”

As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.

“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm.

“Texting can be an enormous tool,” he said. “It offers companionship and the promise of connectedness. At the same time, texting can make a youngster feel frightened and overly exposed.”

Texting may also be taking a toll on teenagers’ thumbs. Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honor student in Bethesda, Md., used to text on her tiny LG phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard. A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs. (Lately, she has been using the iPhone she got for her 15th birthday, and she says texting is slower and less painful.)

Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said it was too early to tell whether this kind of stress is damaging. But he added,

“Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorders, so we have some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs.”

Annie said that although her school, like most, forbids cellphone use in class, with the LG phone she could text by putting it under her coat or desk.

Her classmate Ari Kapner said, “You pretend you’re getting something out of your backpack.”

Teachers are often oblivious. “It’s a huge issue, and it’s rampant,” said Deborah Yager, a high school chemistry teacher in Castro Valley, Calif. Ms. Yager recently gave an anonymous survey to 50 of her students; most said they texted during class.

“I can’t tell when it’s happening, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said. “And I’m not going to take the time every day to try to police it.”

Dr. Joffe says parents tend to be far less aware of texting than of, say, video game playing or general computer use, and the unlimited plans often mean that parents stop paying attention to billing details. “I talk to parents in the office now,” he said. “I’m quizzing them, and no one is thinking about this.”

Still, some parents are starting to take measures. Greg Hardesty, a reporter in Lake Forest, Calif., said that late last year his 13-year-old daughter, Reina, racked up 14,528 texts in one month. She would keep the phone on after going to bed, switching it to vibrate and waiting for it to light up and signal an incoming message.

Mr. Hardesty wrote a column about Reina’s texting in his newspaper, The Orange County Register, and in the flurry of attention that followed, her volume soared to about 24,000 messages. Finally, when her grades fell precipitously, her parents confiscated the phone.

Reina’s grades have since improved, and the phone is back in her hands, but her text messages are limited to 5,000 per month — and none between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays.

Yet she said there was an element of hypocrisy in all this: her mother, too, is hooked on the cellphone she carries in her purse.

“She should understand a little better, because she’s always on her iPhone,” Reina said. “But she’s all like, ‘Oh well, I don’t want you texting.’ ” (Her mother, Manako Ihaya, said she saw Reina’s point.) Professor Turkle can sympathize. “Teens feel they are being punished for behavior in which their parents indulge,” she said. And in what she calls a poignant twist, teenagers still need their parents’ undivided attention.

“Even though they text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” she said. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.”

Ron Rash - Serena

Yes, it's a compelling novel, full of themes, and I enjoyed it very much. Rash is a great Southern writer, the equal of anyone.

Nutso Conservatives (from Paul Krugman)

The thing that is really driving conservatives crazy, I think, is that their identity politics just isn’t working like it used to. Their whole approach has been based on the belief that Americans vote as if they live in Mayberry, and fear and hate anyone who looks a bit different; now that the country just isn’t like that, they’ve gone mad.

Who is Bob Dylan Today?

May 24 – Bob Dylan Turns 68

DYLAN: THE HISTORY
I’ve been a Dylan fan since 1965, I can still remember hearing “Positively Fourth Street” on the radio---the first time I heard his voice. It was different. No chorus. It just went on and on. I loved it. From the first time I heard Dylan I was hooked. (When I was down, you just stood there grinnin’)

DYLAN: THE SYMBOL
As much as anybody, Bob Dylan symbolized the 60’s. I am a child of the 60’s pure and simple. Everything I think, everything I do, everything I AM, derives ultimately from that decade. Anything about me that you can think of can be traced to the 60’s. My life is a series of footnotes to the glorious 60’s. (The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind; the answer is blowing in the wind)

DYLAN: THE LYRICS
In the 60’s we debated the lyrics. We youngsters felt that Dylan knew things that we did not know, and that we could search for hidden meanings in his song lyrics to discover what he knew. Eventually we realized that Dylan didn’t know anything that we didn’t know or could discover on our own. We were not disillusioned about this. It’s just a sign of our hard-won maturity. (We were so much older then; we’re younger than that now)

BUT WHO IS BOB DYLAN TODAY?
At 68 he is my role model. The man continues to work, continues to write new music, continues to rework his old music---HE KEEPS MOVING FORWARD. This is his legacy today. Beyond the music, beyond the words, beyond the symbol, beyond the memories, he (as Randy Jackson might say) is working it out. Keep moving forward, keep working it out: this is who Bob Dylan is today. (It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there)

P.S. Dylan adorns the cover of the May 14th issue of Rolling Stone. I tried to grow the facial hair to imitate (mustache and tuff of hair below the lower lip), but I can’t seem to do facial hair in an attractive manner. My wife laughed at me as she saw it develop. My haircutter suggested a product called Just for Men to darken the facial hair, but my wife laughed even louder. I gave up. BUT IF I COULD, I’d be walking around today trying to look like Dylan.

Ron Rash - One Foot in Eden

After Freddy's review of "Serena," I went looking for Ron Rash. Before finding "Serena" at the Alabama Booksmith, I bought and now have read "One Foot in Eden."

I can say for real that Ron Rash is the real deal. He is the next great Southern writer. He writes of the Carolinas, his South, but it's so similiar to my South, Alabama.

I will not regurgitate the plot except to say that it revolves around the murder of a man named Holland Winchester. The implications of this event against the backdrop of a changing landscape and way of life for country folks (the power company is clearing their land) work their way to inevitable conclusions.

I wish that certain people did not have to die at the end, but this is the prerogerative of the author. I like Rash's writing because it's taut and directed without undue embellishment. In other words, I like his laconic style.

Now I've started "Serena." It's early, but I can say that this book is chilling.

Your Brain on Google

By Ezra Klein
19 May 2009
Washington Post

I liked these musings from Peter Suderman:

Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.

In other words, books taught us to think like they do — as tools for storing extensive knowledge. Now the web teaches us to think like it does — as a tool for recall and connection. We won’t be so good at memorizing everything there is to know about a particular small-bore topic, but we’ll be a lot better at knowing what there is to be known about the broader category the topic fits into, and what other information might provide insight and context.

You can, of course, overstate the novelty of this. People forget most of what they read in a book. (One editor I know complained about forgetting what he'd written in previous books.) I mark up my books ferociously. The hope is that my brain is a good enough index to remember which books are useful and where I'd marked the important passages.

In that way, I wonder whether our brains aren't becoming less like indexes and more like librarians. The situation isn't quite as Peter presents it: The key skill isn't knowing where to find information. It's knowing where to find where to find information. It's understanding connector terms and knowing the relative specialties of different search engines and finding the best aggregators and possessing ninja-level skills with Nexis. We don't need to learn to think like Google. We need to learn how to help Google think.

The Decline of the GOP

The decline and fall of the Republican Party in recent years has been so widespread that the party has lost support among nearly every major demographic subgroup of likely voters across the country, according to a new Gallup poll.

The party lost support among a broad swath of Americans, from conservative to liberal, low-income to high-income, married to unmarried, and elderly to young.

The only subgroup in which the party saw a slight increase in support from 2001 to 2009 was frequent churchgoers.

The biggest declines, of roughly 10 percent, occurred among the college-educated, 18 to 29-year-olds, and Midwestern voters.

The turning point was 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, when the party's support really started to free-fall, according to Gallup: "By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades."