Texting, "What Hath God Wraught?"

As the father of two teenage girls (my young son hasn't yet started texting - although he is already asking for a "phone"), I certainly can relate to this article. Changes in communication trends also impact my business. Communicating quickly is often the key to to our success. And like Ira points out below - we have to communcate with four different generations, and they all communicate differently.

Texting, "What Hath God Wraught?"
by Ira Wolfe

When Samuel Morse sent the first electronic message from the U.S. Capitol to his partner in Baltimore nearly 170 years ago, he typed "What hath God wrought?" I believe nearly every parent of a teenager today might be muttering the same words.
We are in the midst of four distinct generations of Americans trying to communicate with one another using different media. Communication gaps between parents and kids or managers and employees are nothing new. It's been the subject of thousands of books. Experts have made millions and millions of dollars prescribing remedies to bridge the gaps and mend fences. But they've seen nothing like the gaps occurring today between the Veterans (born before 1946), Baby Boomers (born 1946-64), Generation X (1965-79), and Millennials (born 1980-1999)... or have they? Has anything really changed over the past 170 years?
Take the phone for example: According to Nielsen Mobile, in the first quarter of 2009, the average U.S. teen made and received an average of 191 phone calls and sent or received 2,899 text messages per month. By the third quarter, the number of texts had jumped to a whopping 3,146 messages per month, which equals more than 10 texts per every waking non-school hour. Just for the sake of comparison, at the beginning of 2007, those numbers were 255 phone calls and 435 text messages.
It's hard to believe that little handheld device we used to call a phone is quickly joining the transitor radio and 8-track cassette in flea markets and garage sales. Don't believe me? Just try calling anyone born during the 90s or later. Good luck on getting a real person on the other end to answer it. Voice mail? Good luck on getting a listen before it's deleted. Email? You've got to be kidding. That's old school, baby.
That makes the term "phone" almost obsolete. Using that mobile device to call someone is just a vestige of old technology. The older Millennials, also referred to as the iGeneration because these young people have been raised on the iPod and the Wii, rarely if ever use their "phone" to call someone. They communicate almost exclusively by instant messaging and Facebook. (I intentionally excluded Twitter because contrary to popular belief, young people "don't get Twitter."
This explosion of text messages, tweets, and updates of non-verbal communication is stunning. It has many peoples' shorts tied up in a bunch. "How will kids today ever learn how to communicate?," is often the cry heard from multi-generational training audiences. And the spelling and grammar? "Well...it's horrific," parents and teachers proclaim. But historians might see this revolution in communication as just another lesson in history repeating itself.
Isn't instant messaging today just Morse Code v2.0? What's changed since Morse tapped in that first message? Upon brief reflection, it seems eerily familiar. One person taps a bunch of keys on an electronic device which transmits a message to another party. Only this time the code, all those texting abbreviations that drive grammar and spelling cops crazy, is translated on the spot by the recipient.
Ironically even Morse's first message reverberates loudly with today's texting dissidents -- "What hath God wrought?" It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"Reprinted with permission from Ira S Wolfe and Success Performance Solutions. Copyright 2009 Ira S Wolfe."