Posted: April 23, 2007

Last Saturday, a 13-year-old girl named Morgan Pozgar, won the LG National Texting Championship, in which contestants were challenged to text a small paragraph without any mistakes in the quickest time possible. The paragraph, from the movie Mary Poppins, read, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidoucious! Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious.” Young Morgan rifled off the statement in 15 seconds without any errors and was awarded $25,000 for her efforts.

While I applaud Morgan for her talent and her impressive win, it is an almost unnoticed statement she made after her victory that really caught my eye. During one of the numerous interviews she gave after the contest, Morgan estimated that she sends over 8,000 text messages a month to various people. This certainly explains her proficiency, and if she can really text that quickly, perhaps 8,000 per month really isn’t that much.

Yet, this is not a career athlete who dedicates their life to training, going from contest to contest in hopes of garnering accolades and money to continue pursuing their passion. In fact, the LG Championship was billed as the first texting championship to be held. No, this is an otherwise normal girl who sends at least 8,000 messages per month. Let us consider the math.

1) 8000 messages a month works out to roughly 267 messages a day.

2) The average person sleeps 8 hours a day, leaving 16 hours of conscious time per day. (Actually, it has been widely shown that teenagers sleep more than this and more than any other age group, but since I can’t be entirely sure that Morgan doesn’t text in her sleep, we’ll call it even.)

3) If she did nothing else but text all day, Morgan would compose and send roughly 17 messages an hour, every hour, or about a message every 3.6 minutes.

4) If Morgan takes only 2 hours and 40 minutes a day to wake up, brush her teeth, go to the bathroom, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, and any other task that might take her away from her device momentarily, her average now becomes one message every 3 minutes. That’s every 3 minutes she is awake, every day of the year.

Now obviously, we here at Cellit believe that text-messaging is an amazing technology which has opened up incredible opportunities for communication which hardly existed before. Yet just as television, the internet, and mobile voice have dramatically changed the way we communicate while simultaneously creating unimaginable opportunities for addiction and time-wasting, so too does texting have the potential to envelope those who choose to obsess over it. Just think about the types of things we look up on the internet, or talk about on our cell phones simply because we can. Hopefully, the new wave of uber-texters is just a phase, and the technology will soon fit in nicely with the rest of the mobile universe; but it is important to realize its potential for abuse and make sure that we recognize the signs of this abuse before it goes too far.

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