Why is texting more popular than making phone calls?

My niece asked me if I would pick up a few items for her before she headed back to college. I explained that I would be glad to help out and that I would get in touch with her over the weekend. So, I made a special trip on a Saturday to begin my search for a few of the items in which she had requested. That morning, I called her on her cell phone to clarify a few things before I bought them, but, she did not answer my call. However, no more than thirty seconds later, she sent me a text message which stated, “What do you need?” I absolutely thought that I was going to run off of the road. I explained that I needed her to call me! When she called me, she could not understand why I was so furious with her text message response to my phone call.

I posed this question in a Twitter hashtag this morning to my technology staff and later discussed their answers in our meeting to help me get some perspective on this situation. My staff members that are about thirty years and younger all agreed that texting is the best form of communication because they could multitask, it was a fast way to communicate a brief response, and that it was considered awkward talking in a phone conversation. They also agreed that in a text message you could think about your response a little longer than in a conversation. When I asked if this form of social culture or interactions with others was the new norm, they quickly responded yes. However, the older than thirty generation spoke up and interjected that while they liked to text message and could see the advantages in which the younger staff members had mentioned, that they could still see the need for conversation over messaging for some situations.

This made me think about a recent problem of instructional practice that we identified as a district. The problem identifies that students are not responding during discussions at the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and are having a hard time articulating their thoughts. It makes you wonder if the use of texting over face-to-face and phone conversations is helping to create this problem of practice in which we have identified and are targeting district-wide.