by Anna Etra
Students text all the time for unimportant reasons. Class time is not exempted.
One point that speaker Winona LaDuke made that I can actually relate to is that people in our generation are “addicted to energy. You need to have your cell phone charged and your iPods in at all times.”
Sadly, itâs true. In this day and age, people are always on their phones and feel a constant need to be connected. In class, I see people texting all the time. We see each other five days a week and spend a lot of time together on weekends, so why do we feel the need to talk all the time?
Texting also isnât that great a form of communication. Itâs impersonal and leaves room for too much ambiguity. Time spent deciphering the meaning behind a text and crafting a response could potentially take up more time than a call. We are now sucked into a new form of peer pressure. Because Blackberries show when a recipient of Blackberry Messenger (bbm) reads a text, the sender is informed. There is an additional demand to respond to the message as soon as possible.
Constantly texting causes more problems than one can imagine. Picture texts are just a recipe for disaster. “Sexting,” sending nude pictures via text has already sent at least seven infamous teens to court under charges of child pornography, on the sending and receiving end.
Texting puts us at risk for repetitive stress injuries such as “Blackberry thumb,” a condition in which the excessive texter experiences pain in the thumbs as a result of too much texting without the use of all the fingers, according to U.S. News and World Report.
Donât get me wrong, I am not above the addiction. I cut myself off from most of the world for 25 hours every weekend to celebrate Sabbath. The first thing I do when three stars are finally seen in the sky is check to see if anyone has called, texted, e-mailed or bbmed me.
But it is time for us to take a step back. Call a friend and at least wait until after class to answer a text. Or pull an orthodox Jew and turn off your phone for a day.
