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People Texting More Than Calling, Survey Shows

by Amar Toor on December 17, 2009 at 07:20 AM

We kinda had a hunch that texting was getting out of control. But a recently released survey shows just how text-trigger happy America's become in a year's time.

According to the latest statistics coming out of the Census Bureau, Americans sent more than 110 billion texts in December 2008, or roughly 407 per cell phone owner. The Huffington Post reports the latest figures represent a huge increase from last December, when the average cell phone user sent about 188 texts. Though the figures aren't broken down by user age, Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life Project speculates that teens are primarily responsible. As Lenhart observes, "For them, there is less interest in talking." And that's actually the most interesting part of the trend -- while texts are increasing exponentially, actual phone calls are becoming shorter. Last year, the average chatter spent 2.3 minutes on each call, the shortest average since the 1990s.

Perhaps what's at work behind these numbers, though, isn't just a case of people substituting calls with texts. We think that, to a certain extent, human speech (on the phone, at least) has been influenced by texting, which would explain the diminishing call duration. Texts and tweets have rendered most written communication almost Lilliputian in length, so it may make sense that we would mimic that in speech. Whether or not this is a bad thing from a social perspective is debatable. How many texts are used to arrange face-to-face meetings, for example? Perhaps texts are actually making "real" socializing easier. All we're saying is that yeah, text messages are skyrocketing, but that may not be such a bad thing after all. [From: The Huffington Post]

Tags: texting, top, trends

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