Texting backlash makes it good to talk after all

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Texting is one of the truly great inventions of the modern era – it allows you to tell somebody what you want to tell them, in a few short words and without having to engage in small talk about their day or lives.

It takes seconds from start to finish and when you’re texting you don’t have to deal with anyone other than the person you’re looking for – no passing over of the phone to your aunt as well as your uncle; no hanging on waiting for someone to get out of the bath or the loo; no unexpected deviations from your mission.

And best of all, it is almost certainly free, or at least it’s very cheap; it’s fast and only Twitter is more to the point.

But now it turns out that, like most good things in life, too much text can be bad for you – in this case particularly bad for your back.

It’s because of the way we text, you see, we are bent over at the neck looking at what we’re writing with our thumbs.

The potential damage to those thumbs is already well documented – inveterate texters have been known to see their thumbs balloon like a prop forward on steroids, while the other four fingers remain like beanpoles in a row.

Experts reckon that, by the time today’s teenagers hit college, they will have spent around 10,000 hours on their phones….texting, not talking.

And as they do, their necks are bent downward at impossible angles. As one surgeon in the US put it, they might as well have an average sized seven year old on their backs.

Because a new study which has appeared in a publication called Surgical Technology International finds that texting can add up to 50 pounds of pressure on a person’s spine, depending on the angle at which the person is texting.

This study is the work of a spinal and orthopaedic surgeon called Dr Kenneth K. Hansraj, who calculated how stressful varying degrees of curvature would be on a person’s spine.

At zero degrees of tilt, the resting pressure is equal to the weight of the person’s head – unless you’re a brain surgeon or an executive for Irish Water, that is roughly ten to twelve pounds.

But for each 15 degrees of tilt, the pressure increases. At 15 degrees, a person feels 27 pounds of pressure; at 30 degrees, it ups to 40 pounds; at 45 degrees, 49 pounds; and at 60 degrees, a person should feel roughly 60 pounds of force on the spine.

You’ll notice it fairly quickly if you text – or even try to read a book – in the car. Not while driving obviously, because that will be an instant reaction but passengers will be car sick in minutes from trying to read or write with their heads at a forward angle.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.