The Rabbi: Texts Don’t Shoot People, People Shoot Each Other Texts. Or Something Like That.

The rabbi writes: I saw a report on “hyper-texting” on the TV news and surfed the web. I found a related article at idahostatesman.com. “Teens who text 120 times a day or more – and there seems to be a lot of them – are more likely to have had sex or used alcohol and drugs than kids who don’t send as many messages, according to provocative new research. The study’s authors aren’t suggesting that ‘hyper-texting’ leads to sex, drinking or drugs, but say it’s startling to see an apparent link between excessive messaging and that kind of risky behavior.” The TV commentator said experts advised parents to be aware of the dangers and keep their kids from texting so much . . .

I find it fascinating that they correlate hypertexting with risky behaviors and suggest that hypertesting is the root cause of the risky behaviors—instead of finding what is causing the teens to hypertext. Factors that could include low self esteem (hence the drive to be “popular”), poor parenting, etc. Seems like the same argument used to vilify guns: blaming guns for gun crime rather than the criminal.