Tech-savvy teens talk texting Donathan Prater / Staff writer
December 9, 2007 There was a point in the not-too distant past when students who wanted to communicate with each other at school passed notes - sometimes in the hallway between class changes and other times in the classroom. While the notes are still being passed, the mode and medium by which they are delivered has gotten a serious upgrade. Handwritten notes have given way to cell phones, BlackBerry and PDAs. And along with these new forms of digital communication, have come a high-tech lexicon this generation of technologically savvy teens and young adults have grown up on- namely the Short Message Service (SMS). But if you were to ask most high school students, they’d just call it text messaging. Text messaging, or texting, has a history that some believe dates back to 1989 when a one friend sent another a message using a pager, typing in the numbers 0-7-7-3-4 and telling the friend receiving the message to turn their pager upside down, making the numerals appear to spell out the word "hello." Acronyms like bff( best friends forever), lol (laugh out loud) and idk (I don’t know) are part of the sales pitch for one cell phone company, but in the case of a few Opelika High School students, art actually does imitate life. Their lives to be exact. While she has a perfectly functional cell phone, Christina Porter, a senior at OHS, prefers to communicate with her friends using text messages at times. "Some people on the phone just won’t shut up, so if you’re texting them and you don’t want to talk anymore, you just don’t text them back," said Porter, who on a busy day has sent more than 150 messages to her friends. "Or you might have to call the person, wait for the phone to ring and if you’re calling their home, you might have to ask to speak them instead of speaking to them directly right away," said Sara Mattox, 17, also a student at OHS. Just like real estate, for Patrick McDougald, many times deciding on whether he will text message a friend has to do with location. "You might be in a situation where you can’t talk on the phone and you need to get a message to a person," said McDougald. And while none of them (Porter, Mattox and McDougald) admit to ever having sent text messages to their friends during class, some of their classmates do. "If you know what you’re doing you can simply stare at the teacher like you’re paying attention, have your hand in your pocket, type in a message and send it," Mattox said. Porter agreed. "If I already know what the text message is that I’m trying to send, I don’t even need to look at the cell phone keypad to type it in," Porter said. "I just know where the keys are." Phones and BlackBerry devices with Qwerty keyboards and T9 (predictive text) features make texting even faster. While they’re fine-tuning their writing skills before they head off to college next year, there are times when the line between the way they text message their friends and how they approach their writing assignments for classes can become blurred. "With rough drafts and essays, I find myself having to go back and make sure everything’s spelled out correctly," Mattox said. "Because if we wrote an essay the way we text, that assignment would get a failing grade," Porter said. That’s something Charles Hannah, a 12th-grade AP English teacher said he hasn't seen show up in any of his student’s work at this point. "But as younger kids grow up with texting, spelling could become more of an issue," Hannah said. "While it’s good to see students using different ways to communicate, because text messages are typically short phrases, students may not get the practice with more complicated word constructions they need. What that means is that while they can use these word constructions when they speak, they may not know how to present them correctly in their writing." And while text messaging has its own rapidly growing set of terms that combine letters and numbers that communicate words, it may be a little too soon to think of it as a language all it’s own even if it is popular among teens and young adults. "It’s not the number of speakers that determines whether a code is a language- it’s the linguistic structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon and discourse patterns) that does," said Robin Sabino, associate English professor at Auburn University. "Text messaging is parasitic on languages, meaning it can’t exist without them." | 
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