Texting ... Is anything really that important - Part II

Apparently I’m not the only one who gets irritated with people constantly texting. Yesterday’s blog post “Texting ... Is anything really that important?” 

brought about several comments of readers who voiced their own annoyance.

Before listing some of those comments, let me tell you what I saw at a bowling alley last weekend. On one of the lanes I noticed four girls and two boys, all of them teenagers. In-between waiting for their turn to throw the ball, they were sitting there, not saying a word to each other, but texting furiously on their phones.

Madeline from Melbourne commented that she was in a fashion boutique the other day, waiting for her friend in one of the dressing rooms. Next to her was a teenager looking at pictures. After a while the teenagers’ friend came out of the dressing room area and asked “Did you get my selfies?” to which the teenager replied “You should get black one.” Apparently, the girl in the dressing room had been sending her friend pictures of herself in various outfits, rather than coming out of the dressing room and showing herself.

Gina from Amsterdam, commented that she recently visited the Keukenhof in Lisse, when she noticed two girls scrolling through pictures of flowers, commenting and texting, completely oblivious to the abundance of flowers at their feet. She said “I felt like grabbing them by the scruff of their necks, forcing them to look what at the beauty around them.”

Angela of Vancouver said much the same. She noticed a couple of girls looking at pictures of cats and kittens on their phone, not noticing the cat at their feet, desperate for some attention.

There were more comments, some from as close by as Canada and the United States, others from as far away as China, Romania, Poland, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the Ukraine, all of them complaining or making fun of cellphone use. 

But it seems in addition to texting being annoying, it could – according to Brendon Keim - also be bad for young brains.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/is-multitasking-bad.html