By Olivia Barker, USA TODAY
To be sure, the monthly bills — as high as $300 — were a problem.
But there were other, audible consequences of the fact that Alexandra Smith would pound out more than 1,000 text messages from her Razr cellphone a month: She was chatting — constantly, exhaustively — but she wasn't talking. It got so that Smith's parents were begging her to put the phone to her lips instead of her fingertips.
So these days Smith, 18, is practicing something that came oh-so-naturally to tides of teens before her: the art of vocal gab. Instead of holing up at home and punching out digital dialogue, Smith is making an effort to actually meet up with her three best friends and flex her larynx muscles.
"I figured I should probably go over and learn how to talk to somebody," says the Eugene, Ore., high school senior. "I didn't want to be the dork at college who texts all the time."
She needn't worry. College suitemates, even roommates, pick up their phones to ping each other. Otherwise, they're communicating via instant messaging or the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.
With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers' bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library.
So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: "Every time I've seen you, you're out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You're all sitting around the table on your BlackBerries." Lohan matter-of-factly explained that she had "like 1,000" messages to answer.
Not long ago, prattling away on the phone was as much a teenage rite as hanging out at the mall. Flopped on the bed, you yakked into your pink or football-shaped receiver until your parents hollered at you to get off.
Now, Sidekicks and iBooks are as prized as Mom's Princess phone, and conversations, the oral kind, are as uncomfortable as braces. Which makes employers and communications experts anxious: This generation may be technologically savvier than their bosses, but will they be able to have a professional discussion?
"We are losing very natural, human, instinctive skills that we used to be really good at," says Sonya Hamlin, author of How to Talk So People Listen: Connecting in Today's Workplace.
A couple of years ago, Hamlin was asked to teach a class of "very bright" California high school seniors about the college admissions interview. Their mock answers were "extremely short and not informational. Nothing came out, really, because it's such an unused skill."
Part of the reason, Hamlin says, is because "they're not listening. With IM, you can reread six times before deciding how to answer." There's no improvisation, she says, none of the spontaneity of phone banter or a face-to-face chat. "Talk is a euphemism. We do it now in quotes," Hamlin says.
And when face-to-face chats do occur, there are other verbal kinks. Stefani Beser, a freshman at Villa Julie College near Baltimore, texts so much — 20-40 times a day "if there's a lot going on" — that the shorthand creeps into her live conversation. "You'll be talking and all of sudden you'll say, 'Oh, LOL,' " text-speak for "laughing out loud."
Back home, Beser would e-mail her mom a stairwell away to ask when dinner was ready. Her boyfriend courted her through Facebook and then IM. With roommates, "we could literally lean our computer chairs back and talk to each other, but we IM and text."
A 2005 report for Achieve, a non-profit organization that helps states raise academic standards, found that 34% of employers were dissatisfied with the oral communication skills of high school graduates; 45% of college students and 46% of high school graduates who entered the workforce instead of college said they struggled with their public speaking abilities.
Among teens who go online daily and own a cellphone, 53% most often communicate with friends via written messages, according to a 2005 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and 61% of the time they're chatting via IM. Texting wasn't prevalent enough when the study was conducted to figure prominently in the data, but it likely would now, says project research specialist Mary Madden.
