4 U 2 No (or FYI, if you prefer)

Image from New York Times

The other day as I was walking through the halls en route to my Arthurian lit course I was stampeded by a distracted band of texters, eyes fixed on their phones.  They bounced off passersby (and me) as if they were balls in a pinball machine.  And they never missed a beat.

This behavior concerns me and this recent New York Times article suggests that my worries are well founded.  The anxiety expressed here is not new - that texting has changed adolescent brains and will have a negative effect on attention spans - but the comparison to the effects of television is novel, at least to me.  The great irony is that television-watching, which has always been demonized, comes off as the healthier of the two activities because it requires sustained attention, not the multi-tasking that Facebooking or texting encourages.

My question, which you've probably already anticipated, is what kind of effect will such behavior have on language use?  A friend of mine who is an active Tweeter told me that he no longer can tolerate lengthy texts.  Because texting and tweeting requires short and to-the-point text, longer works seem frivolous, superfluous, not worth the time.  What will then happen to the discursive text?

And the question that follows is: how should we respond?  Do we stop texting?  Do we limit Facebooking?  Or do we embrace these activities and change the way we learn and produce/consume text?  One alternative, which in some way responds to the latter, has been explored in another recent NY Times article.  Do we need go digital?  And if so, what is at stake for such digital texuality?