By Olivia Barker, USA TODAY
In 2004, 22% of North American cellphone subscribers were active texters, according to Nokia's Bill Plummer. Last year, it was 36%. In 2005, more than 500 billion text messages were sent and received worldwide, as reported by Verizon Wireless. By 2010, it is projected to be more than 2.3 trillion.
In the meanwhile, phone companies are tapping into teens' tapping tendencies. Virgin Mobile is unveiling Switch_Back, a kind of junior BlackBerry with a qwerty keyboard and AOL IM built in. "We really think that text is the new talk," the company's Howard Handler says. A quarter of Virgin Mobile's teen customers use their phones for texting more than talking. "We are living in a 160-character nation," the maximum text message length, Handler declares.
Erica Beal's slide into text-based talk reads like the plunge any addict takes: From age 12, her ear was attached to her cellphone. "I'd call my friends, who I had just seen, all day, and talk to them all night." At 15, she got hooked on texting. At 17, it was MySpace. Now, the 18-year-old Manhattan high school senior texts 10 to 15 times a day "at least" and checks Facebook as soon as she gets home.
Four years ago, Carol Weston did "the nice-mom thing" of getting her older daughter, Lizzi, then 14, her own landline. It lasted two years. "I realized we were paying for nothing, really," says Weston, author of Girltalk: All the Stuff your Sister Never Told You. (IM had become Lizzi's medium of choice.)
Nowadays, the family phone doesn't ring very much, either. "On the one hand it's nice and peaceful at home," says Weston, who lives in Manhattan. "On the other hand, it's hard to figure out which boys are calling." Hence another consequence of a text-centric household: "Mom and Dad just can't eavesdrop as much as they used to."
So some of them are adjusting. When Brett Dicker's son spent his junior year in London, "we probably spoke to him less than half a dozen times the whole year, yet we were literally daily IMing." Now that Matt, 22, is back at the University of Southern California, he and his mom text "all the time," says the fiftysomething Dicker, who works in marketing and lives in Woodland Hills, Calif.
The primacy of the keyboard has been, well, a lifeline to the kind of guys who, a generation ago, grasped the family room receiver with a sweaty palm and a pounding heart. IM "makes life easier, absolutely," says Nick Kacher, 17, a junior from Waltham, Mass. "I'm not a big sit-around-and-chat-on-the-phone kind of person." Friends, and girlfriends, would needle him about his phone phobia. Now, with IM, "I definitely do chat."
But even for a texting and IM fiend like Heather Hogan, who's known to slide her Sidekick under the table and punch away at family events, there are limits. Last month she met a guy while out with her friends. They swapped numbers, but he never called. He texted Hogan, 18, four or five times a day. It got "kind of annoying," she says. Without any verbal cues, gauging his interest level became tough. So Hogan stopped texting him.
In the past three years alone, the standards have become "so different," says Hogan, a Nassau Community College freshman from Bellmore, N.Y. "No one talks, really, unless you're with people."
But experts aren't necessarily worried about what this signals for the future of interpersonal relationships. "Girls get the nourishment that comes with female bonding," Weston says, whether "electronically, telephonically or in person." Guys, on the other hand, "if they're lucky, learn to have tête-à-têttes, or real talk in real time, but they don't come by it as naturally."
Smith does call one person regularly: an ex-boyfriend who lives three hours away. At first, it was only for five minutes a chat. Now she has reached a marathon 40-45 minutes. "It was hard for me to talk on the phone. It was a big change."
