ROGERS: Texting provides connectivity, not social barrier

An up-and-coming texting champion lives in my house. A sprite 17-year-old, my daughter can text entire paragraphs in the blink of an eye. As I plod my way through T9 textual transactions, she laughs at my cumbersome, digital discourse. My novice attempts at 21st century communication amuse her.

Like many families in the United States, we suffer a technological gap in communication. While I don't succumb to the impulse of deluging everyone in my phone's address book with up-to-the-minute dispatches, she's her own walking newswire service. In a typical month, she sends and receives more than 5,000 text messages.  

With that kind of traffic, she's now a communication hub, the center of a network. Like many parents, I worried my child's texting habits were interfering with her life at school. I saw her 5,000 texts as interruptions – more than 188 hiccups in thinking a day. How can teenagers stand it? And what is it that makes this form of communication so important?

Before taking a "Literacy Through Popular Culture" class with Dr. Robert Petrone, I would have looked at this teenage behavior as a deviation, some sort of violation of "normal" behavior that stood contrary to "real" world purposes. However, looking at my teen's text habits through a pop culture lens, I'm seeing her world, and mine, differently.

Looking at my teenager, seeing how easily and often she uses this technology, it's not difficult for me to imagine the technology's profitability. Tech experts from a variety of markets predicted 15 percent increases in text revenue for 2008. Though the hard numbers are difficult to procure, the estimated text traffic for 2009 is expected to reach nearly two trillion worldwide.  

Some, like tech blogger Matt Kapko, estimate that texting will garner $224 billion by 2013. Citing a report by Portio Research, Kapko claims that texting will remain the "cash cow of mobile data revenues for some time to come."

What I am struggling to understand is what makes this form of technology so important to the teenage consumer market. What do they get through text messaging that they can't get through other, more personal, forms of communication?

As much as I hate to sound off like my grandfather, opening up with a social rant beginning with, "In my day," it seems that's exactly where I find myself. In my day, we wrote notes during classes. In Mr. Spetzi's World History class, in the spring of 1985, I learned it was possible to feign absolute intrigue with post-WWI military tactics while writing lengthy social commentaries to my best friend, Kim.

Like the Bersaglieri bike troops of the Italian army, Kim and I covered a lot of ground. Our note exchanges between fifth and sixth periods were far more creative than Jason Bourne's hackery. Forget hostile American counter-intelligence operatives. When facing off against harried and underpaid public school teachers you need some serious Counter Intelligence Agency skills.

We risked something to get that message through, and those messages could be a matter of life of death in our teenage world. "Don't go to Jake's tonight. Your ex will be there" and "Sharon Curry bought the same dress you did for the dance!" were of supreme importance within the seedy confines of teen intelligentsia.

What I remember most, well, more than Sharon Curry's attempted prom coup, is how those notes became the foundation of my friendships. If we mattered to each other, we used our notes to make that clear. And our world was not necessarily the same world our parents lived in. It was a space in which we claimed our autonomy and voice.

If I had to name the primary location of the communications gap between my generation and my daughter's, I'd have to say that my world was print and paper. Her world is bytes and liquid screens.

I suppose it's easy to discredit cell phone texting, to accuse texters of ruining the English language by truncating it into vowel-less representations of "real" words. But looking through my daughter's eyes, I see she's just trying to hang on to some sense of connection in a world that makes it so easy to feel insignificant.

Is it possible that the ways in which adult culture portrays youth culture actually harm our youth? Do we spend so much time seeing and planning their futures that we can't see them in the moment with us? I think so. As educator and theorist Ernest Morrell notes, teenagers are doing all kinds of rich intellectual work – they're just not always doing it where we expect.

Displays of teenage learning are found outside of academic texts and in the discourse spaces of everyday living like napkins, journals, graffiti, poetry, lyrics and other spaces outside of school, including cell phones. Helping teens and young adults see the evidence of their thinking in these spaces is what popular culture pedagogues can help everyday teachers and parents do.

Looking at my daughter's cell phone through this filter, I can see that she's doing some important relationship building while going to school and working a part-time job. I see that she manages to always let me know when she'll be home and when she's coming by my office. I can also see that she's being the kind of caring, young adult I had hoped she would be, checking in on her friends, listening to them, talking with them. She takes care of the people she values.

Perhaps she's not suffering hiccups in her thinking so much as she's making sure she's thinking about those she loves. Her grades are up, and she's doing well in school. She has a job. She's a good kid, even if she lacks my clearly superior stealth C.I.A. skills. But I'm not worried. She's not interrupted. My kid's connected.

Erica F. Rogers is a Ph.D. student of English. Reach her at ericarogers@dailynebraskan.com.