A great article, and a great headline, from Sunday’s New York Times: “Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)”. One highlight from the piece:

“Texting is in between calling and sending and e-mail,” he explained while taking a break from study hall. Now he won’t even consider writing a letter to his mother, Jan. “It’s too time consuming,” he said. “You have to go to the post office. Instead, I can sit and watch television and send a text, which is the same thing.”

Ummm… no. That’s not the same thing at all. If writing a letter were the same as writing an SMS, then you wouldn’t always choose SMS.

Semantics aside, it’s scary to think about how SMS and other, similar technologies are already mutating our methods for interpersonal interaction. As the author points out in the article, the telephone was similarly (if not more) disruptive, but of course, to me, the landline telephone is “normal,” because I grew up with it. So the proverbial kids today are growing up with email, IM, VOIP, and SMS, and all of those communications media are, to them, just “normal.”