Texting KILLS...no not really.... well kinda.

Well with the convenience of email and portability of pagers and mobile phones, it was destined to happen. As soon as the technology and infrastructure allowed phones and other devices to become portable and cheap enough, text messaging as we know it was born. Here is the usual wiki link to the inner workings and history of text messaging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging

Text messaging came at a time when you had a few different main options on the ways you could communicate to someone. You could, talk to someone in person, you could call them, , you could page them but they would have to call you back sometime, or you could email or write a regular letter. Calling someone on the phone, whether it be mobile or a land line, meant getting into a involved conversation and if on a mobile phone then you would using up your minutes. A lot can be conveyed through a conversation on the phone but sometimes you don’t really want say too much at all. Email and regular mail meant that you had to be able to receive the mail in question (this being before smart phones were as common as they are today ), which means there could be a large gap of time in between sending the message and the other person actually receiving it. Pagers at the time were somewhat limited in what they could send, and were for the most part one-way, meaning you still had to access a phone to send back a page if you wanted to.
Enter text messaging. Text messaging fills in that gap in between email and paging. As more and more mobile phones were made that supported text messaging, there were more people that could receive texts than had data plans for emails. So people could just text you instead of call you. It was quick and did not require you to say a single word. This by the way is useful when you can not speak at the moment, for example in a meeting or during class. Well text messaging today is now the most popular way of reaching someone. With technology advancing, almost all mobile phones now can send and receive text messages, and its a standard feature on any new phone. Text messaging has become so common and ingrained into our every day life that it actually is a bit of a problem. As seen in this link, text messaging can be a common cause for car accidents.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-06-11-dwt_N.htm

So how does this effect how i talk to my friends and family? I would say, that for short replies or to ask a simple question, text messaging is hard to beat. However i still like to call people or email for more important or in depth matters.