
Text messaging could hurt ability to read nonverbal cues
Alexandra Angelovich
Issue date: 10/2/09 Section: News
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Junior marketing and entrepreneurial management major Travis Kettle finds texting to be distracting, especially when he's studying.
"The constant text messaging is taking your mind off what you're doing," he said.
Yet it's so simple, it's difficult to give up.
"It's kind of a chore nowadays to call people," Kettle said. "Texting lets you send quick, easy statements."
Excessive communicating via text messaging and social networks could hurt young people's ability to read nonverbal cues, warned an author and English professor at Emory University, and some university officials agreed that effects of all-verbal communication could be detrimental.
In a Sept. 4 article in The Wall Street Journal, Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future," argues that all-verbal communication affects people's ability to decode the "silent language" - posture, eye movements and hand gestures, for example - that humans acquire through face-to-face interaction with one another.
David Whillock, dean of the College of Communication, said text messaging has a direct effect on students' interpersonal relationships because readers have no idea if a person is stereotyping, talking down or patronizing them. Students may not be able to pick up on twitches, hand signals or voice inflections because of a lack of oral communication, he said.
"A lot of people in your generation are having problems with communication because they don't observe," Whillock said. "If I tell you something, and I'm lying to you and I have a certain body position, you can't read it. You may believe it to be true."
Kelly O'Brien, director of the Center of Professional Communication at the Neeley School of Business, said there are other concerns that apply to university students. O'Brien said that because texting has become the preferred method of communicating, it has minimized opportunities for face-to-face interaction.
"I think it could have a potential consequence of not being able to have important conversations face to face when we really need to have them," O'Brien said. "Nothing is going to ever be able to replace the synergies of two people sitting down face to face."
In his article, Bauerlein cites 2008 Nielsen Mobile findings that teenagers sent and received 2,272 text messages on average each month. He also cites a National School Boards Association estimate that middle and high school students devote an average of nine hours per week to social networking.