A recent outbreak in teen texting is taking a toll on their daily lives. Many teenagers have cell phones. Their parents get them phones for their safety and well-being, but is that what teens really use them for? I for one know that I rarely call my parents or use my phone for important reasons. Most of the time, I’m scrolling through Instagram and snapchat, to keep up with everyone that I will see in less than a day. The editorial from The Jersey Journal, called Teens are going to extremes with texting, informs the common people of the statistics of teen texting. The editorials main argument is communicating the excessiveness of teen texting. The author develops this point through expert uses of word choice, but also extreme examples and statistics. …show more content…
The author of the editorial uses excellent word choice to display their overall thought; that teens need to be cut down from their cell phone usage. Word choice can help a lot to display the meaning behind a work of writing. In the editorial, Teens are going to extremes with texting, the author uses a very strong phrase in paragraph two, which says “Doctors are beginning to recognize such obsession as addiction that is robbing children of sleep at the very time in their lives when they need it the most.” This sentence adds style and flare to the paragraph. With words like “obsession,” “addiction,” and “robbing,” the author makes it sound like the problem of teen texting is more than what it is. The author also writes “To accomplish that astounding yet not unusual feat, daily activities like bathing and sleeping are interrupted, thumbs pumping, to read and respond to an avalanche of messages.” They give us the impression that most kids don’t sleep and bathe, when that is an exaggeration. The whole debacle is made more interesting with selective word choice, and overall explaining the message with style. Although word choice displays many pieces to indicate the main argument, the author also uses statistics to glue those pieces together and form a strong argument.
Statistics make everything more believable, and strong examples reveal real life situations. The author writes “One 14-year-old New Jerseyan featured in a recent Star-Ledger story receives up to 10,000-10,000! - text messages a month.” This evidence is extremely unlikely once you really think about it, but who takes the time to evaluate anymore? You’d just believe whatever the article says because there’s nothing else to prove it wrong. The author also includes a study that says 13- to 17-year-olds send or receive an average of about 1700 texts. This is much more believable, but also a dramatic amount that surprises you. Authors include statistics like these so that they get across the point that their trying to make. The author also includes government action opposing phone usage on the road, in addition to a rehab center for “obsessive use of video games, texting, Facebook, eBay and Twitter.” These ingredients come together to form great evidence and hinting to the main argument of teens overactive texting. So, how much of a problem is teen texting. Many factors come together to form a great main argument. From the editorial, Teens are going to extremes with texting, you are lead to believe that texting is an intense obstacle for teens to get over. The author projects thing idea through precise word choice and extreme
examples and data. These elements come together creating a firm informational writing.
Doctor Jean Twenge is an American psychologist who published an article for The Atlantic titled “Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?” in September 2017. The purpose of Twenge’s article is to highlight the growing burden of smartphones in our current society. She argues that teenagers are completely relying on smartphones in order to have a social life, which in return is crippling their generation. Twenge effectively uses rhetorical devices in order to draw attention to the impact of smartphones on a specific generation.
Ketenjian, Tania. “Are Kids Addicted to Texting? (And Is That a Bad Thing?).” Huffington Post 27 Sep. 2013: 1. Print.
To begin, it is evident today that teenagers love being connected with their friends and family all at the tip of their thumbs. They love texting. According to a study by Amanda Lenhart, 88 percent of teens use a cell phone or smart phone of which 90 percent of them use text message. An average teen sends 30 texts per day. (Lenhart) As shown in this study, teens have easy access to text messaging. In her Ted talks called “Texting That Save Lives” and “The Heartbreaking Text That Inspired a Crisis Help Line,” Nancy Lublin talks about how she received disturbing text messages from young people that mentions how they’re being bullied, wanting to commit suicide, cutting themselves, and being raped by their father. She was exceedingly emotional when receiving these texts. She felt like she had to do something about it. So, with her knowledge about teens and the power of texting, Nancy Lublin created something that would help save these young kids’ lives, the Crisis Text Line. (“Texting”)(“Heartbreaking”)
Today in the Twenty-First century we have surpassed many technological advancements and excelled far past what we would have ever thought. One of our greatest technological advancements is the thing we hold in our hands everyday, our cell phones. Sometimes we don't realize just how much our phones can distract us from our lives. As a generation glued to our phones us teenagers send an average of 3,339 texts per month. In Randy Cohen's essay, “When texting is wrong” he states how we are overcome by texting and how it damages our social and personal lives.
In Jean Twenge’s article, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” he says, “More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.” While this does cause them to be safer, many of them don’t develop satisfactory communication skills considering most of them do not talking to others in person. They also do not learn how to use their body language to properly convey emotion. More evidence for phones not being too harmful comes from Lisa Guernsey’s article, “Don’t Take Away Your Teen’s Phone,” she says, “’I know how easy it is to find negativity and hurt on the internet,’ my daughter told me. But, she added, ‘it is also through the internet, on sites like Tumblr, where teens often find comfort and can engage in discussions of how they are feeling.” While this might paint social media usage in a warm light, people should think of all the pain that comes from usage of social media as well. A point from Jean’s article illustrated this point, “You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest it does not.” This points out the fact that even though teenagers spend a lot of time on their phones, it is not
In our world there are many forms of communication and these devices are beginning to take a toll on our younger generations. In Jeffery Kluger’s article,” We Never Talk Anymore: The Problem with Text Messaging,” the idea that younger generations are becoming socially inept due to technology is discussed. As these younger generations consume texting as a main form of communication other important social skills deteriate.
People’s lives are influenced by the lack of communicating. For example, in Hamilton Spectator’s article Wired For the Future, the writer explains the negative effects caused by the lack of communicating by saying, “[i]f teens stop communicating with their friends and others face to face, they will lose the ability to navigate complex social situations and that could be devastating for them when they are faced with college and job interviews....” (Hamilton Spectator 2). In other words, that when people keep forgetting how to communicate by overly using messaging systems, it could lead to negative problems in their lives: interviews or meeting with delegates. Those are important to people’s lives, because when children are independent and working in their jobs, they have to socialize with others. Communicating is unavoidable in social life, because people still communicate even though texting and messaging are taking enormous space in our world. In addition, People text too much without talking and communicating face to face. For instance, in Jessica Mazzola’s article Nighttime Texting, she showed the surveyed data of texting by saying, “...American teens send and receive an average of 1,500 texts per month” (Mazzola 1). By all means, texting is rooted deeply in people’s lives and replaced where real conversations should be. As the article mentioned, 1,500 texts per month should be affecting people’s lives directly. Communicating face-to-face and real conversations are certainly reduced dramatically as the texting increases. Therefore, people get influenced by the erosion of
Post inception of the cell phone has fueled a shift in the civility of adolescent social interaction. Gone are the days of seeing teenagers imaginatively playing alongside each other with the only restriction being his or her ability to effectively communicate. Virtual conversations, text messages and online social networks have replaced development of social skills through personal interactions. Some educators insist that cell phones provide a unique opportunity to capitalize on the learning experience in the modern classroom. Unfortunately, cell phones also provide an opportunity for adolescents to compromise their ethical values and moral standards. Adolescents are known to be source for cheating on exams, disrupting the classroom, and promoting inappropriate behaviors. Distracting characteristics of cell phone usage have shown a negative effect on the reading/writing ability of the adolescent and their subsequent readiness for higher learning. School administrators are challenged to balance the right of possession of the devices by adolescents and the monitoring /control of the school environment during a crisis. A school administrator named Patrick Gabriel drives a point home when he says “The constant use of cell phones, perhaps symbolic of life made virtual by all technology, seems to compound the problem. It has a powerful pull on so many. From my office window, I see students leaving school early or arriving late texting and calling with practically every step they take. The need to stay connected at every moment trumps all other behavior”(38) . Educators, parents and students must not ignore the temptation to let the addictive behavior associated with cell phones to dictate the classrooms learning environment. The value...
Amy Gahran, a media consultant exploring communication in the technology era, writes about how cell phones are significant. She feels that cell phones have changed our lives by providing “…vital services and human connections…offer new hope, even through simple broadcast text messages” (Gahran). Gahran is insisting that cell phones allow us to learn news quickly, connect with safety, and can even fight crime through video recordings (Gahran). In addition, she feels that the overall benefits of owning a cell phone outweigh any negatives. This somewhat challenges the ideas presented by Rosen because it points out more benefits of cell phones. In “Our Cell Phones, Ourselves” Rosen mentions that although cell phones indeed connect us with safety, they can often lead to a sense of paranoia. To expand, she writes that parents who give children a cell phone for security purposes, develop a paranoid sense of their community and lose trust in “social institutions” (Rosen). In making this comment, Rosen argues that although cell phones may be beneficial, they can change the way we view our world. Without a cell phone, many individuals feel vulnerable, as if their phone protects them from all possible dangers that they may encounter. In fact, a Rutgers University professor challenged his students to power off their phones for 48 hours and report back with their experience (Rosen). Many felt almost lost without it and one young women described the feeling “…like I was going to get raped if I didn’t have my cell phone in my hand” (Rosen). In reality, having a cell phone will not save a person’s life in all situations. Although many, including Gahran, feel a phone is a vital tool, it has changed how we feel about the world around us and how vulnerable we feel without a phone in
“I’m sorry I didn’t hear you. I was responding to a text message. What were you saying?” Have you ever heard this expression or something similar; we all have. This is clear evidence of how cellphones can be a very big distraction in many social settings. Some people check their cell phone first thing in the morning. It is so easy to waste time playing on your cell phone rather than doing something productive. Cell phone use, can cause harm physically, socially, and academically, although cell phones have some good qualities, advancements in technology is causing the world to gradually become dependent on technology.
...d and bad ways.'” A new research from the article “internet effects on soceity” also shows that average teens send about 100 text messages per day. This is also affecting the teens in the real world too. Teens nowadays are having difficult times getting jobs because they are not used to small talks and giving accurate details.
In the sources that I found about text message and teen literacy, it showed and also informed me on how teens take the next talk to the classrooms in schools and how it creates bad grammar among themselves. During my research I found out that many kids and kids use shorthanded text and it affects their literacy in so many ways. We as teens don’t think that our findings will benefit anyone unless they want to have a short knowledge in grammar. As teens we don’t really see how doing something wrong can harm us. Such as texting shorthanded, and with silly faces. It affects our literacy by not knowing how to correctly punctuate their words, grammar and speaking. In the research that I looked up, that teens send about one thousand eight hundred
Cell phones have crept into an owner’s possession at all times. “The mobile phone has become a part of us: our best friend who will save all our secrets, pleasures and sorrows” ("Exploring"). Teens have developed the need to know the latest news on social media every minute of every day; they do not want to miss any little detail. Since the beginning of smart phones, high school students have felt the need to have their media open on their smart phone in front of them so they do not feel empty. Once someone has become attached or addicted to something, it is hard to change their habits. Cell phones have changed people socially, especially with the availability to social media with electronics.
Mobile phone is a device which allows its user to make and receive telephone calls to and from the public telephone network which includes other mobile phones and fixed line phones all around the world The use of cell phones has dramatically became a new age of convenience for billions of people around the world. Teenagers are the majority of mobile users in the world. Mobile phones have become one important part of a teenager's life. The usage of mobile phones has re-shaped, re-organized and altered several social facets of life (Ravidchandran, S. V., (2009)). When focusing on teenagers’ mobile phone usage, literature has provided evidence for both positive and negative effects of mobile phone on teenagers. In this high-tech world a mobile phone equips a teenager with all its needs.
Technology is one of life’s most impressive and incredible phenomena’s. The main reason being the shockingly high degree to which our society uses technology in our everyday lives. It occupies every single realm, affecting people both positively and negatively. There are so many different forms of technology but the two most often used are cell phones, and the internet/computers in general. Today’s younger generation was raised alongside technological development. Kids now a days learn how to operate computers and cell phones at a very early age, whether it be through their own technological possessions, a friend’s, or their parents. They grow up knowing how easily accessible technology is, and the endless amount of ways in which it can be used. This paper will be largely focused on the effects of technology on the younger generation because your childhood is when these effects have the largest impact. I am very aware of the subject because I am the younger generation. Aside from major effects on study and communication skills, there also exist the media’s effects on teen’s self-esteem and mental health. Maybe more importantly, there is our world’s growing problem of over priced and unnecessary consumerism. Over time, our society has created a very unhealthy form of reliance and dependency on technology as a whole. People essentially live through their devices. Cell phones are always with people making it nearly impossible to not be able to reach someone at anytime, day or night. In 2011, there were 2.4 trillion text messages sent, and 28,641 cell phone towers were added across the US. 1 We use our phones and Internet for directions, communication, information, self-diagnosis, games, movies, music, schoolwork, work, photos, shoppi...