Texting - :) or :(

As the news breaks that texting is now our national preferred form of communication (Shock! Gasp! Amazeballs!), the “experts” have crawled out of the woodwork to denounce texting as the reason why the youth of our great nation are incapable of communicating face to face.

They have watched teenagers on buses, fingers flying with almost supernatural speed across a keyboard of letters so small that we can barely see them, even with our reading glasses on, and they have felt the fear. The fear of the unknown. The fear of something they cannot understand. The fear that people younger than them can do something better than they can (surely anyone younger than me should still be building sandcastles?). And so, a national outcry – outbleat – begins.

There are many problems with this theory. For a start, teenagers can communicate – at least with each other. Try to get to sleep before midnight during the summer holidays in a flat above a SPAR shop and you will no longer doubt their communication abilities – you will be praying for silence. Fact – teenage girls, regardless of education or social background talk non-stop, and at full volume. Just because we do not understand the language, that does not make it any less valid. They text each other when they are not together, very sensibly saving themselves the extortionate cost of making a mobile phone call, but that does not mean they do not talk when they are together. I remember when I was a teenager – oh so many moons ago – I could spend the entire day in the company of a girlfriend, then when I got home I would instantly find I had still more to say to her and jump on the phone, much to the horror of my parents and the ruination of their finances.

I think what experts mean is that the “yoof” cannot communicate with them, the grownups. Very possibly they are confusing ‘cannot’ with ‘will not’. Or have they considered the possibility that the situation is the other way round; they are the ones having trouble communicating with the young people?  Just think of the televised interviews you have seen involving a paranoid looking politician or over eager presenter trying desperately to elicit information from a grumpy, bored looking adolescent in a hood. Excruciating, no? But in almost every case it was the politician or presenter who appeared wrong-footed, and not the disenfranchised, swoosh-covered interviewee.

Okay, I admit that there are some extreme cases. Regular articles appear in the press with quotations from despairing business owners, unable to fill a position and considering suicide after a series of interviews with monosyllabic, mumbling carpet gazers. However this is not a new problem, and to blame it on our “text culture” is a stretch, and somewhat naïve.

Surely the real culprit has been uncovered by the other study results to come out this week; Problem Families. The conclusions of that report make for unsettling reading. In families where violence, sexual abuse and abandonment are commonplace, eloquence is not a priority. In families where nobody speaks to each other but only shouts, where rational discussion is unheard of and children are largely ignored, how on earth can we expect the youth of these families to communicate with strangers? And what would we expect them to communicate, if they could? It is tempting to blame the schools, but teachers with large classes to teach and control can only achieve so much. A parent who reads to their child, who talks to them intelligently, who discusses issues and ideas with them, is setting their child up for the future far better than an overworked, stressed teacher ever could.

Texting is an effective, and ever more prevalent method of communication. But to blame it for the inability of young people to communicate face-to-face? Ridiculous. Or, in text-speak: R U AVIN A :D?