Teenagers and Texting: Hazardous or Harmless?

Cell-phone texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and their friends, with cell calling a close second. One in three teens sends more than 100 text messages a day, or 3000 texts a month. Some 75% of 12-17 year-olds now own cell phones, up from 45% in 2004. Those phones have become indispensable tools in teen communication patterns, and for many parents, teens' attachment to their phones is an area of conflict and regulation.

Teens are texting almost 80 messages a day – at school, on the bus, during dinner, and in bed late at night, and the number of teen texters are on the sharp rise since 2006. As of 2009, more than half of teens (54%) were found to be daily texters.

Do you remember back then when chatting on the Internet was the trend?  Well, with mobile phone technology bringing you the ability to send text to other phones, chatting has gone mobile. Like its predecessor, texting can be quite dangerous and hazardous especially when children do it with reckless abandon, most especially teens. In fact, many children have regressed in their development because of texting.

It calls parents and professionals to wonder, what effect is this having on teens’ education, health and well-being? Do you think teen texting is harmless or harmful?

Cell phones and radiation - how safe are cell phones?

Cell phones are almost as common as pocket change these days. It seems nearly everyone, including an increasing number of children, carries a cell phone wherever they go. Cell phones are now so popular and convenient that they are surpassing landlines as the primary form of telecommunication for many people.

Yet, as cell-phone use continues to grow, so does concern about the possible health risks of prolonged exposure to cell-phone radiation. Is Growing Cell-Phone Use Increasing Health Risks?

Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

Wireless cell phones transmit signals via radio frequency (RF), the same kind of low-frequency radiation used in microwave ovens and AM/FM radios. Scientists have known for years that large doses of high-frequency radiation—the kind used in X-rays—causes cancer, but less is understood about the risks of low-frequency radiation.

Studies on the health risks of cell-phone use have produced mixed results, but scientists and medical experts warn that people should not assume no risk exists. Cell phones have been widely available for only the past 10 years or so, but tumors may take twice that long to develop.

Because cell phones haven’t been around very long, scientists haven’t been able to assess the effects of long-term cell-phone use, or to study the effects of low-frequency radiation on growing children. Most studies have focused on people who have been using cell phones for three to five years, but some studies have indicated that using a cell phone an hour a day for 10 years or more can significantly increase the risk of developing a rare brain tumor.

What Makes Cell Phones Potentially Dangerous?

Most RF from cell phones comes from the antenna, which sends signals to the nearest base station. The farther the cell phone is from the nearest base station, the more radiation it requires to send the signal and make the connection. As a result, scientists theorize that the health risks from cell-phone radiation would be greater for people who live and work where base stations are farther away or fewer in number—and research is beginning to support that theory.

In December 2007, Israeli researchers reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology that long-term cell-phone users who live in rural areas face a "consistently elevated risk" of developing tumors in the parotid gland compared with users who live in urban or suburban locations. The parotid gland is a salivary gland located just below a person’s ear.

And in January 2008, the French Health Ministry issued a warning against excessive cell phone use, especially by children, despite the lack of conclusive scientific evidence linking cell-phone use with cancer or other serious health effects. In a public statement, the ministry said: "As the hypothesis of a risk cannot be entirely excluded, precaution is justified."

How to Protect Yourself from Cell-Phone Radiation

General recommendations to minimize the potential health risks include talking on cell phones only when necessary, and using a hands-free device to keep the cell phone away from your head.

If you’re concerned about your exposure to cell-phone radiation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires manufacturers to report the relative amount of RF absorbed into a user’s head (known as the specific absorption rate, or SAR) from every type of cell phone on the market today.

Dear 16-year-old Me!

Multitasking and the Brain

Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price

Think you can watch videos, make cell phone calls and send e-mails all at once? Stanford experts say even trying can impair your cognitive control. Communication professor Cliff Nass and researcher Eyal Ophir explain why.

To watch the video, click here.

"Multi-taskers" are bad at one thing: multi-tasking

People who text-message while listening to an iPod while reading the newspaper probably think they are good at "multi-tasking." They are wrong, according to a study published Monday.

By Amy Norton

Researchers at Stanford University found that college students who made a habit of immersing themselves in various media at once were not very skilled at tests of memory, attention and, ironically, "task-switching."

In a nutshell, "they're terrible at multi-tasking," Dr. Clifford Nass, one of the researchers on the work, told Reuters Health in an interview. The findings, published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are surprising, the researchers admit. The findings also suggest that today's array of devices that make multi-tasking possible, and supposedly easy, may not be a good thing.

Going into the study, Nass said, he and his colleagues assumed that "heavy multi-taskers" must have some innate ability that allowed them to handle several tasks at once. Maybe they were good at filtering out irrelevant distractions from their environment, the researchers hypothesized.

But a simple cognitive test of such filtering -- where test-takers were asked to focus on the characteristics of a group of red triangles while ignoring a few extraneous blue triangles -- showed that multi- taskers performed more poorly than people who were not prone to media multi-tasking

The same was true when study participants took a test that measures the brain's ability to organize and file away information, and when they took a test of task-switching. The multi-taskers were actually slower to shift their attention from one test task to another.

The study included 262 college undergraduates who filled out questionnaires on their media use -- how often they went online, watched TV, read, listened to music, emailed and text-messaged, and how often they did a few of those things at once. Students classified as either heavy or light media multi-taskers then took the series of cognitive tests. While the results suggest that heavy multi-taskers are not actually good at what they do, the reasons for that are not clear, Nass said.

Overexposure to too many media distractions may be at fault -- or it may be that people who are "born bad multi-taskers" are, ironically, more drawn to doing it.

It's possible, according to Nass and his colleagues, that heavy multi- taskers tend to have a generally "exploratory" orientation: they simply like to gather lots of information, even if that means sacrificing their performance on the task at hand.

But whether heavy media multi-tasking causes the differences seen in this study or not, Nass said, the implication would seem to be the same: "Heavy multi-taskers should stop doing it."

"Society is developing tools all the time to make multi-tasking easier," he said. "The question is whether that's a good thing."