This is a crappy story: Texting May Be Taking a Toll on Teenagers – NYTimes.com
Here’s the first three grafs from a story in the New York Times. Before you are even done reading the lede graf, if you are like me, you already know what the third graf is going to say… wait for it… wait for it….
They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
via Texting May Be Taking a Toll on Teenagers – NYTimes.com.
And it goes on, true to formula, with he said/she said journalism representing both sides saying the new thing is evil and the new thing is great.
We see these stories all the time: <insert behavior/product/technology here> may/might/possibly/perhaps causes <insert possible heath risk or societial harm here>. Dull, boring, unconstructive, adds no value. I love to see the ones that bash games, or the Internet… lots of newspaper stories were written that bashed the Internet over the past decade.
@hatchjt reminded me this morning that socrates thought writing would be bad for learning, because it would cause people to remember less. good thing someone wrote it down so we could remember it.