To begin with, text messaging distracts students from class discussion and hinders the education process. Text messaging is extremely popular among the student population with the penetration of text messaging being around 95 percent. (“Text Messaging is Transforming Education”) The instructors often complain that the students use their cell phones and palmtops during the classes for communication with their friends. Some of the teachers state in their syllabuses that “use of sell phones, laptops, Ipods, or any other electronic gadgets is simply not allowed in class,” (“Does Text Messaging Hinder Student Learning?”) but the students still manage to use them communicating with their peers in the course of a lecture.
They get distracted during the class, which results in the failure to absorb the study material properly and, consequently, in failing the exam. What’s more, text messaging increases the number of grammatical mistakes which the students make. The matter is that “when students write e-mails they are much more likely to confuse homophones … A lot of them confuse ‘there’ with ‘their’ and ‘they’re’, and ‘your’ with ‘you’re’.” (“Text Messaging is transforming Education”) I myself have noticed that I started using more contractions and confusing different forms of the words when writing text messages; this often results in making these mistakes, together with typos, even informal correspondence or written papers. These mistakes occur due to the lack of time or being inattentive; sometimes they are just taken for granted even when proofreading the paper because I got used to making them while using text messaging. Moreover, I can sometimes use my cell phone at the classes where their usage is allowed, which often distracts me from the lecture.
Facebook is another thing which distracts students from classes. When getting a profile at the Facebook, students start spending so much time there that they forget about their classes and homework; some of them even manage to access their profiles through their cell phones during the class, which not only distracts them but is of certain disrespect for the instructor. This means that text messaging indeed hinders education and results in much worse academic achievements.
Furthermore, text messaging negatively affects friends and family relationships reducing the communication to e-mails and text messages. These days it is easy to notice that “technology takes people away from each other and creates barriers to friendships.” (King) In the modern world the Web became a primary communication tool and “roughly 57 percent of time spent online is devoted to e-mail, instant messaging, or chat rooms.” (McGann) Technologies have deprived people of real-life communication and relationships making text messages the main means of interaction. Most of people get satisfied with the fact that they have at least some kind of connection with their friends and relatives, though, in fact, “instead of communicating WITH people, via e-mail [one] communicate(s) AT them.” (King) This kind of interaction differs greatly from the real-life communication when a person may hug, kiss, or at least see his/her interlocutors, and results in lacking smiles and necessary emotions which people usually get from a conversation.
Facebook is an example of such a communication. Creating a profile at the Facebook allows feeling “connected to someone else who likes the same things,” (Reagan) but at the same time it creates the world of unreal relations and non-existing friendships of people who either have never communicated before they met at Facebook, or have never known each other at all. The photos in the profile may not be real or may be chosen from the best pictures a person has, which means that the profile presents a fake world of a person who compiles it. I have noticed that text messaging reduces the communication to typed messages which can hardly express any emotions; I use them to inform my parents that I am alright instead of calling them or visiting them to inform them about it in reality. This testifies to the fact that text messaging hinders family relationships and substitutes verbal communication by written one.