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[don't always] Text it!

Text messaging. It's hit the world by storm. I would go as far as to say that it's a pandemic. But unlike most other pandemics people fall victim to, it is rarely diagnosed and cured these days.

I witnessed the other day while wandering about the mall food court, three young people seated at a table, two girls on one side and on the other, a young man facing them. There was nothing odd about their seating arrangement, but rather what they were doing. The two who were seated facing one another were each engulfed in their phones, doing what looked very much like texting while the third let her eyes wander around the court, apparently bored.  My protest is not so much against texting.  Text messaging is an extremely handy branch of technology that I personally take advantage of daily.  My feud is with what this generation is doing with texting (not to mention the immature, illegal, pornographic, shameful things people use texting for).  I believe that texting is used for much more than conveying information or having a chat with someone here or there.  Texting has become an escape. Sometimes escapes are okay.  We all need them once in a while. This world is a lot to bear without an escape here or there but I believe the amount of texting one can look up and see almost anywhere has become a way of life for some people, not just a nice innocent little escape.

The thing that bothers me most about this is what we are teaching ourselves about relationships.  In most societies, the quality of ones relationships are something that each is personally responsible for. What are we doing to our relationships when we have friends and family right across the table from us and yet we decide to glue our eyes to a phone?  Many may disagree with me on this but I think relationships can be rooted down much deeper in person than they ever could be using a phone or computer.  So why are we spending our people time on the phone? Why do we insist on spending the precious time we have with those we love building up different relationships through a device?  Through a device that we can only trust has the person we think we're talking to on the other side of it?
-Anna

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