All across the world, teenagers’ bedrooms are beginning to sound like a library. Instead of chatting away on a traditional landline telephone, or even a cellphone, teenagers are busy communicating silently.

According to a 2005 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 53% of teens who own cellphones and surf the Internet on a daily basis mostly communicate with friends via written messages; and 61% of the time they chat through a service called instant messaging, or “IM.”

Phone companies are tapping into youth’s finger-tapping tendencies. Telecommunications giant Virgin Mobile is releasing a cellphone with a traditional keyboard and AOL IM built in. The company’s chief marketing officer said, “We really think that text is the new talk. We are living in a 160-character nation” (the maximum length of a text message). A quarter of Virgin Mobile’s teen customers use their phones more for text messaging than talking.

Several years ago, the author of How to Talk So People Listen: Connecting in Today’s Workplace was asked to teach a class of California high school seniors about the college admissions interview. According to her, the answers given in the mock interviews were “extremely short and not informational. Nothing came out, really, because [oral communication] is such an unused skill.” Further, she stated, “We are losing very natural, human, instinctive skills that we used to be really good at.”

Part of the reason is because with IM, you can reread a piece of communication six times before deciding how to answer. There is no need to improvise; there is none of the spontaneity of phone conversations or face-to-face chats.

A 2005 report by Achieve, a non-profit organization that helps states raise academic standards, found that 34% of employers were dissatisfied with the oral communication skills of high school graduates. In addition, 45% of college students and 46% of high school graduates said they struggled with their public speaking abilities.

While technology is advancing at lightning speed, speaking skills appear to be regressing just as quickly. This end-time generation of teenagers may be technologically savvier than their bosses, but they are lacking the ability to have professional discussions.

Source: USA Today