I send text messages. I pay a monthly fee to my cell phone provider for a text package. I am not a teenager, which according to one study means I don’t spend an hour every day punching little keys on my phone.

That hour isn’t time spent in a text conversation, that’s the literal time spent sending the messages themselves–no waiting involved. A Nielsen study says teens with cell phones send an average of 2,272 texts a month, as reported in this Washington Post article.

That’s equivalent to about 76 messages every day (given a 30-day month). If the teens get 8 hours of sleep, that means sending roughly five texts every hour they are awake. The staggering number is the average per year, which works out to 27,264. That’s a lot of LOLs, GR8 C U THENs and THX BFFs.

I don’t think I could send that many if I tried, and I’m sure there are thousands of parents who thank whomever came up with a way for them to not have to pay for those texts 15 cents at a time.

Of course, I wasn’t a teenager when “everyone” had a cell phone, so it’s hard to truly judge the Nielsen data. Back in the day, we had Instant Messenger as the form of communication “everyone” utilized. Your screen name was the ticket to endless banter about today’s history assignment, who smelled on the bus this morning or who was going to the football game on Friday.

Before the advent of such detached technologies, I suppose people used regular phones to actually speak to one another. Those are the same people who wrote letters and mailed them–with stamps. I’m not saying we should go back to that kind of society; I like the ability to send a sane number of text messages in a month. But maybe certain things shouldn’t be unlimited. Back in the beginning years of the internet, we were all concerned about the number of hours we were using. Now that DSL and cable are practically ubiquitous, “everyone”–myself included–spend more time than is really necessary online. Without that clock, those limits, there’s less of an incentive to pursue other things.

The text packages are the same way. The article states that the subject family spends $30 a month to get unlimited texts. How different would habits be at $0.15 for every one of those important messages? Surely some of them would be handled in other ways, and maybe that would promote a more well-rounded experience for “everyone.”

G2G. TTYL.