Techno-babble
Technology allows for instant communication in many different ways—that, of course, is a good thing. Unfortunately, the affordability and ease with which people can now communicate proliferates excessive amounts of useless and annoying “junk talk”—what I consider to be a very bad thing.
Take cell phones for example. Incredibly useful devices, these cell phones are. Whether you’re in danger, stranded or lost, cell phones provide for the priceless convenience of contacting civilization from somewhat remote locations. You can’t really argue against that. In daily life though, those situations don’t arise all that often (fortunately). However, since people continue to carry these handy little things around despite the relatively rare occurrences of real emergencies, what do people decide to do with these devices in the mean time? I’ll tell you what they do. They inundate their friends and acquaintances with barrages of pointless and useless communications that serve virtually no other purpose than to say “Hey! I exist…remember? Pay attention to me!”
Many years ago when I first began my college career, I observed a plethora of instances where students would race out the door from a class, immediately place a call, then proceed to tell the poor soul on the other end of the phone that “class was so boring today”; as if the message deserved some form of urgency. Since then, text messaging has become commonplace and, as a result, junk talk is no longer consigned to outside of class time—people use their cell phones to message each other during class time as well as outside of it. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you people are sending each other, but a) it’s not important at all, and b) it’s probably more annoying than anything to the person on the receiving end.
In fact, text messaging is annoying in several ways. First of all, it is usually referred to as “texting.” “Texting” is a stupid word. “Text” is only a noun or an adjective, not a verb. You should not be able to “text” me anymore than you could “audio” me, “sentence” me or “word” me. Second, text messaging is ridiculously difficult and cumbersome. Phones have ten numbers. The English alphabet has 26 letters. Putting them together does not make life any easier. Further, since it is obviously such a pain to type the simplest of words on a phone, most messages that are sent are short and meaningless. On the other hand, if one desires to send a lengthy text message, they have to invest at least 5 times as much effort to type the stupid thing as they would to simply call the person. This latter point is compounded by my next complaint: Text messaging costs more money than simple phone calls. Think about this. Not only does it cost extra money to send a text message, it even costs money to receive the stupid thing. If my phone plan is any indication, it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 cents per text message for both sending and receiving. That means a text message costs about 40 cents for the entire transmission. Forty cents to communicate what? “Lol” or “Omg”? Useless! The worst is when you get a text message asking you a question. What are you supposed to do, type a response? What if the answer is “yes”? Do you really want to pay almost a quarter to say “yes” to someone over a text message when you could far more easily just tell them over the phone?
At the risk of being stereotypical or sexist, I’m nevertheless going to claim that it is overwhelmingly the females amongst us that are responsible for most of this junk talk. Thankfully, they seem to do it mostly to each other while sparing my male counterparts and I from the burdensome task of listening and responding to this stuff; but we still get roped in on occasion. I don’t know why women find it so important to use their cell phones endlessly–my male, practical-minded nature simply doesn’t understand.