Young Cell Users Rack Up Debt, One Dime Message at a Time

“Chaz Albert, a freshman at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., is a passionate ‘texter,’ someone who loves to send and receive pithy text messages via cellphone. He does it at home, at school and at work. He often prefers texting over talking on his cellphone.

Last month, though, Mr. Albert's habit caught up with him. Only $80 of his $400 cellphone charges were his father's, and most of his own, he said, were for text-messaging….

Karina Gonzalez, a sophomore at Newtown High School in Queens and a regular sender of instant messages by computer, had her phone confiscated by her mother after her text messages resulted in a $150 phone bill, triple the usual amount. ‘I cried,’ she said. ‘I felt like I lost a piece of me. You can send a million instant messages a day, and it won't cost you anything. If you send one text message, it can cost you like a phone call.’

Her friend Denise Lucero, 15, who has never owned a cellphone, surreptitiously used her father's phone for a while, she said, to text-message her friends. One month, those messages pushed his bill to $300.

Then her father started to hide his phone: on top of the refrigerator, under the sofa, behind the television set, in his pillow.

Both girls said their inability to text message made them feel left out of the action. ‘It's about feeling part of a little group with cellphones,’ Denise said. ‘You want to learn what is going on.’…

Teenagers are clearly driving the trend. ‘Younger people do text messaging a lot more than older folks,’ said Mr. Nogee of Instat. ‘They're more used to it from instant messaging on the computer, from growing up with it. Older people would rather call up and talk.’…

Verizon Wireless, with 42 million customers, reported a fivefold increase in the number of text messages sent and received monthly, to almost one billion in the fall from 200 million in early 2003. A Verizon spokesman, Howard Waterman, said that people aged 16 to 24 represented the "’eading customer segment.’ ” [New York Times]

Emphasis above is mine, because I really wonder how well are we serving these kids. If they’re going to spend the money on text messages because it’s their preferred method of communicaiton, shouldn’t libraries communicate that way, too?