Friday, November 21st, 2008

Mangiaracina: The dumbing down of America: Part 1

By Nick Mangiaracina (Contact)

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Writer’s Note: What follows is part one of a four part series that deals with the theme of the dumbing down of America. Though the idea for this series came to me in the middle of the night, these articles have been brewing for a long time. It is only now that I have reached the breaking point. The anti-intellectualism and stupid comments have become too much to bear. You can only repeatedly punch a man in the face so many times before he decides to retaliate. This is the beginning of something bigger than just being angry. It’s about turning H.L. Mencken’s words that “no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,” upside down. It’s about throwing it all away and then picking up the scraps of what looks good to form a new and improved America. By “new” I don’t mean that we continue to ignore the past for the sake of the future, but that we learn that simply because something is new does not make it superior.

So here I am, phone resting next to my computer, vibrate function on. I’m not expecting a text message, nor am I expecting to send one. Even if I had unlimited text messaging, I wouldn’t use it. What’s the point?

This article is about standard 12 button keypad text messaging on a 1 x 1 ½ inch screen. Though I still find P.D.A and touch-screen text-messaging both ridiculous too, they are less ridiculous than the 12 button variety because they are more efficient to type into and typically feature much larger screens.

The 12 button variety is the most absurd version of text messaging because it requires multiple keystrokes to enter most characters. This hassle leads people to bizarre abbreviations, intentional misspellings and shortened messages.

In response to the inefficiency of text messaging, a girl once told me that she had become very fast at it, so because of this she was no longer wasting her time. In other words, she had become faster at wasting her time, which meant she was no longer wasting her time.

Likewise, regardless of how fast you are, because of the immense effort required to send a simple message, people usually don’t talk about anything meaningful.

The small screen size makes meaningful communication more difficult. On my phone, the screen is 1 x 1 ½ inches. This means that if you attempted to read this sentence on my cell phone, you would have to scroll down in order to read it all. Increasing the size of the screen would reduce this problem, but this would make the phone less convenient, which is the whole reason people send text messages on phones in the first place.

However, this is not to say that there is no place for text messaging on cell phones. There is, but in rare instances.

In emergency situations, text messaging is more efficient and more useful than calling people to warn them about potential danger. It’s also far more efficient to send one text message to thousands of phones than to call each person individually to warn them. A text message would also be more effective than sending out a mass e-mail because its far more likely that people will be carrying a phone than checking their e-mail at a computer, or even on a phone.

For people who are either deaf or hard of hearing, text messaging could also help them. In the movie Babel one of the main characters finds herself isolated from society but is able to connect with her deaf friends via text messaging. This doesn’t solve her loneliness, but it does temporarily lessen it.

Unfortunately, in most instances text messaging is just a waste of time. It serves as a means to communicate for the sake of communicating. My former sociology teacher was right when he said that as communication technology advances, people just talk more about less. Nowhere is this more evident than with text messaging—especially when you could use the phone for the reason it was invented—to talk to people.

With cell phone text messaging it’s not the will to connect that’s bad. In fact, this is the most hopeful aspect of text messaging. However, this innate human desire could be better nourished with quality conversations instead of quick message fixes that only serve to make our relationships poorer.

Mangiaracina is a Lenexa senior in journalism.

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