

Average teen sends 3,339 texts per month - nano81
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/10/15/teen.texting.mashable/index.html?hpt=Sbin

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jawee
As a teenager who uses texting a lot (16k sent last month)... here's some
thoughts about why this isn't so extreme:

1) Texting works like IM for most people. It's a back and forth conversation
where each message generally represents one line of conversation. A
conversation on IM can span 100s of lines easily; having several long bits of
conversation to different people throughout the day quickly adds up even if it
is not especially consuming.

2) Further, on some plans texting can include other things. Somewhat
ironically considering what I said above, Mobile IM on many Verizon phones
counts as a text every time a message is sent or received. So if I'm using
AIM, MSN, etc on my non-data plan phone, I can rack up text numbers quickly.

3) Twitter. I don't use it on my phone, but I know some who do. If you get
Twitter texts every time someone you follow updates, you can have a lot of
extra traffic being sent. The same goes for Facebook status messages and
whatever other traffic can go through a phone.

I don't really consider myself a super heavy texter, but it's my main
conversation with some people for even longer conversations. I also used about
1200 minutes on the phone; it's not just for texting. But when you're limited
to no data plan, and you have a phone that has a default keyboard and so forth
(I have an LG Voyager, chosen simply for having the best phone keyboard for
me), it can look like a lot.

16k is only about 500 messages a day. Check your last IM log.. I looked at one
on Skype text chat and it was at 650 from just a few of hours of off and on
talking to a nerd friend as he messed with some stuff on his Droid 2.

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_delirium
The numbers for older people are higher than I would've expected as well.
45-54 year olds send an average of 500 or so texts per month? I'm in my late
20s and don't average that (I'm closer to 200). I wonder what the
distributions look like; are there a handful of people sending 10,000?

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alanh
Median would be more instructive than mean, in other words.

Once clearly illustrated by my psychology professor: She said if a student
asked her what the average salary of her graduates was, she’d answer with the
median, considering one of her students went on to become an NBA star, but
most earned small fractions of his salary.

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MoreMoschops
That's over a hundred a day. Bollocks. This "study" has people in their mid
thirties sending ten a day, which also seems ridiculous. Some of them, sure,
but on average? Nonsense.

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DevX101
This is really surprising. The volume for teens completely blow everyone else
out the water. At this rate, they're sending 7 texts per hour ALL day and
night, assuming they take 8 hours to sleep.

What the hell are these kids talking about?

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w1ntermute
You have to realize that once you get an unlimited texting plan, you don't
hesitate to send a ton of one or two word texts.

~~~
_delirium
Newer SMS interfaces also encourage that by making each text look like just
another line in a chat, instead of a separate "message". I have an older phone
where you have to read each text message as a separate message, and it causes
a bit of an expectations mismatch when I'm texting with someone who's using a
client that makes it look like a chat window.

I usually send something concise but information-packed, sort of like a tweet,
and minimize separate texts. So I might send something like:

    
    
      just got downtown, at cafe whatever. heard from jim?
    

But if I had a chat-like interface on my phone, I might write three separate
messages,

    
    
      just got downtown
      at cafe whatever
      heard from jim?
    

For me, the latter style is _really_ annoying to receive, because it gets
queued as a series of incoming messages I have to read and dismiss separately,
but I think that's becoming less common on newer phones. If I switched to that
style, I could easily see sending 3x+ more messages without actually changing
how much information I send.

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Macha
Wait, what? This can't be accurate. I'm 17, and the heviest texter my age I
know sends around 800 a month. Among me and my friends, the average is roughly
30.

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nlco
it can be accurate, I think it just depends on the circumstances. I blew over
300 messages just yesterday. As for age, I just barely turned 18, but when I
was in high school I would easily text at 2x or 3x that rate. Reasons it was
so high can be attributed to not being challenged in school (so text in
class), i could easily talk to all friends through the same medium (and
multiple of them at a time), and its fairly easy to mass message to figure out
plans.

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fjarlq
Original article from Nielsen, with related charts:

[http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-
teen-m...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-teen-mobile-
report-calling-yesterday-texting-today-using-apps-tomorrow/)

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xenophanes
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

Forcing kids to sit in school all day doesn't result in them paying attention
to school. They just text all day.

Something needs to change.

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waterlesscloud
My 13 year old niece is within this range, maybe 1000 more or so. And her
average monthly voice time is about 18 minutes. All to her parents.

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Andrew_Quentin
That is one text every ten minutes counting a day as being 24 hours. As most
people sleep at least eight hours, some ten minutes have two texts sent, that
is a highly dubious if not an absolute outright made up claim!

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snth
This ties in well with the Scott Adams blog post that came up recently.

"Wireless Voice Calls Are Obsolete"
[http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/wireless_voice_calls_are_o...](http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/wireless_voice_calls_are_obsolete/)

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duck
This would explain why I have had to wait for a teen to finish texting while
they should of been working at a Best Buy, a local ice cream place, and a
carnival I took my kids to just in the past month. And in two of the cases
they seemed to think it was rude of me to interrupt them.

