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Texting’s cost for teens

May 22, 2007 By Anne Leave a Comment

What a bummer – having to work over summer vacation not to make money but to pay off one’s text-messaging debt. That’s what 17-year-old Sofia in the Washington, D.C., area faces because of a $1,100 monthly cellphone bill for 6,807 text messages last month, and her parents’ plan included only 100 free text messages, the Washington Post reports. “Forget minutes. It’s all about the text allowance. It needs to be supersized, now that instant messaging has leapt from the desktop to the mobile…. Think it, text it, keep it short, have to have it,” the Post adds. Now, anyway, since texting teens is nothing new in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines, much less Europe and the rest of Asia. Last month Verizon Wireless “introduced an unlimited texting plan because even its highest bundle of free text messages – 5,000 a month – wasn’t enough” for teens, according to the Post. It tells of a group of teens heading to Morocco with no phones, and of a mother wondering how they’ll deal with communicating the old-fashioned, face-to-face way.

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Filed Under: mobile, Social Media, texting

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2016 TEDx Talk on
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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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