Sore Thumbs and Texting

Ant writes "ABC News reports that text messaging, once seen as a way to send a short message without running up the expense of a cellular telephone/cell phone call, has become so popular that it poses its own public health problem: sore thumbs. This comes from a survey and warning put out by Virgin Mobile, one of the largest cellular service providers in Great Britain. Virgin reports that 93 million text messages are sent every day in the United Kingdom (U.K.). One estimate for the United States (U.S.), whose population is five times as large, is 700 million text messages a year. "

Nintendo thumb

I used to have this problem all the time in the 80's after too much Nintendo.

Oh come on now.

If my thumbs could survive Dr. Mario, Excite Bike, Punch Out and River City Ransom; I'm pretty sure that they can handle a few LOLs, BRBs and WTFs.

First litigation? Someone else to blame?

Has anyone sued the phone maker, text message service, or anyone else they can think of getting money from? Seems like that's the next story we'll see following all thse people with sore thumbs who need someone other than themselves to blame.

It's just a poll, actually. So they have sore thumbs...big deal.

Arghh bad use of statistics

I hate it when people place two statistics side by side as if they are comparable when they really aren't. It is misleading to say U.K. does "73 million messages per day" while U.S. estimate is "700 million per year". The mind tends to think, wow, the U.S. must text message a whole lot more! When, of course, this is not the case. Since, of course, one is a per year statistic and the other a per day statistic.

/rant off

Doctor, doctor

from TFA: "If your forearms and hands start to hurt, stop." Seems to be similar to that old doctor, doctor joke "doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this" "well stop doing it then". Common sense, really. Who doesn't know this?

What?

"once seen as a way to send a short message without running up the expense of a cellular telephone/cell phone call"

My text messages cost 10 cents per message. I'd have to talk for over 2 minutes to cost more than a text message and I can sure relay more information in that two minutes than most can in a text message and even get feedback during that time. Text messages have their uses but being cheaper isn't one of them. Besides, I thought the point of text messages was to annoy others trying to watch a movie in a movie theater.

once seen

but now far from it. The ammount of money cellphone carriers make off of the service now is shamefull in relation to normal phonecalls.

but seriously...

I Get way sorer thumbs playing Gran Tourismo...

Shall I look out for

co.'s proposing a tiered text-messaging protocol on account of congestion in their pipes?

This just in...

waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

seriously. That's like complaining about your legs hurting after walking 200ft, because you usually just do laps from the fridge to the couch. You can avoid soreness in your thumbs the same way you avoid soreness everywhere else: stretch your muscles (try shadow thumb wrestling), repetition, and don't go till it hurts. You know when you're getting near that point, just stop there.

IANAPFE (I am not a physical fitness expert), but I do play a lot of video games, A LOT of video games, and between that and the literally hundreds of thousands of characters I type on a daily basis for work, I've learned how to deal with digit soreness.

Umm, did someone forget about...

video game controllers? Sorry, but there's no way texting is as rough on the thumbs as bingeing on Gran Turismo. maybe for a few 1337 texters who text a couple hundred wpm, but they need to stop with the "texting = public health crisis" line. there's no way it's true.

Other appendages?

so popular that it poses its own public health problem: sore thumbs

As opposed to other bodily appendages that have also grown sore because of the Internet?

Wussies.

I type on my RIM 950 all day, sometimes even when driving, with no ill effects. It's all about conditioning.

Maybe it's just me, but...

I'm really trying to figure out how "sore thumbs" counts as a "public health problem".

By my definition, a health problem is something that you need medication or a doctor's appointment for. If your thumbs hurt you, taking a break from texting is all you really need. An alternative would be to try holding the phone in your hand a different way- after all, a repetitive strain injury is a repetitive strain injury.

Poor Filipinos

In the Philippines where the average user sent 2,300 messages in 2003, making it the world's most avid SMS nation.
SOURCE [wikipedia.org]

I personally don't like texting

While it certainly has it's uses. It does seem over-used.

Pros for me:
-Have my computer send me alerts.
-Send a quick e-mail to someone from the road.
-Send a short message to someone discreetly in a location where talking on the phone would be rude/inappropriate.
-Get a message through to someone when the reception is there but not good enough to have a conversation.

Cons for me:
-Almost have driven off the road on various occasions while trying to punch in a message or read a message. Way more dangerous then just talking.
-Time consuming to communicate the simplist of concepts.
-Sore thumbs
-U.S. carrier pricing on text messages makes it not make much sense economically.
-Additional way of being in-personal in your communication with other human beings.
-Short messages can be easilly mis-interpreted. Have gotten several people mad at me for no reason just because they took a brief text message the wrong way.

Sore thumbs from the spam...

My thumb is sore from having to delete the spam messages from my cell phone inbox. The worst part? There's no option to diable text messages since don't I even use that feature. Makes want to suck my thumb.

cellphone dialpad as keyboard

I remember reading it on Gizmodo or somewhere, that a company launched a USB keyboard in Japan, which had its keys placed like a cell phone (its very small, and doesnt need a desk). It seems it was for the people (read teenagers) to chat faster.

Use Morse Code

Those who're using text messaging should look into the patches that let you enter messages in Morse code with one key and any finger you want to use. Tests have shown that Morsing works much faster than thumbing text and learning to send the code faster than you can thumb the characters is a trivial task.

Keep in mind that learning to send Morse code is far easier than learning to receive it since you can move at your own pace. In fact, when I took my amateur radio exam back in the distanct past when you were tested by the FCC at their office, the staffer didn't even bother with sending. She knew that if I could receive 13 wpm, sending that fast was trival.

Simply learning Morse code is the equivalent of sending 5 wpm, which is 25 characters or about one character every two seconds, probably better than a lot of text messagers can do with their tired thumbs. And you can do it without looking at a screen.

--Mike Perry, KE7NV, Seattle, Untangling Tolkien

Nothing to worry about

If our wrists survived the proliferation of web porn, I'm sure our thumbs can handle some text messaging.

Umm...I mean...because of moving the mouse so much. Yeah, that's it.

Don't believe those estimates...

Virgin reports that 93 million text messages are sent every day in the United Kingdom (U.K.). One estimate for the United States (U.S.), whose population is five times as large, is 700 million text messages a year.

That's odd... Texting has been practical in the UK much longer than in the US, where for the longest time it simply wasn't possible to send text between networks. There's so much more support for text in the UK and one sees so much more online evidence of a text 'culture' there that it seems unlikely that its per-capita text message use would be higher.

Virgin one of the largest...?

Virgin Mobile, one of the largest cellular service providers

Erm, Virgin Mobile is probably one of the smallest networks. It's certainly not one of the largest, and it uses T-Mobile's transmitters rather than having its own.

iqu :|

fuck this dumb quasi-news

Fuck this dumb quasi-news. People have been playing video games at home for the past 25 years and there was no fucking epidemic of sore thumbs. Give me a god damn break. This isn't even news on a slow day.

Inexpensive?

At $0.10 a pop, it is hardly affordble. Figure a conversation takes 20 such messages, that's $2. That's several minutes of talk time, or dozens of minutes spent texting.

I just don't get it.

CmdrTaco's wrists are killing him...

....why am I almost positive that this is not from Text Messaging?

get a phone that takes dictation...

... no, seriously!

my new samsung a900 has a really functional speech-to-text function for dictating text messages right into the phone.

not useful for a location where you have to be quiet (the library, etc.), but much easier any other time.

http://www.samsung.com/Products/MobilePhones/Sprin t/SPH_A900ZKSXAR.asp [samsung.com]

User Interface

While I like the idea of SMS, I hate the user interface on the cell phone. The text input methods are an ugly kludge and the buttons on the phone were designed for some other species.

This is why I always roll my eyes

everytime I read a comment here bemoaning how many useless features mobile phones have "that nobody use".

Based on these statistics, people in the UK send roughly 50 times as many text messages each year as people in the US. Factoring in the relative population sizes, on average we send 250 times as many SMSs as you guys do.

You might not use those "useless features" on your phones, but we most certainly do. Entire message boards exist solely to compare the picture quality and associated features of the various camera phones, which is a serious deciding factor for some people when buying a new phone...

Something strange with the statistics

According to this [itviikko.fi] link (in Finnish), there were 20.5 billion text messages sent in 2003 in UK and in Finland the figure is about a billion per year. The one billion limit was broken in 2001 and you have to remember that the population in Finland is less than six million.

Oblig VG Cats

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=30 [vgcats.com]

US vs Europe

As the statistics say (not very clearly), texting is far more popular in the UK (and I would assume Europe, too) than the US. Cue lots of americans saying it's expensive and crap and don't understand why it's so popular.

Reason is that texting is cheap and universal in Europe (inc. the UK) because of the GSM network prevalent there, plus all sorts of organisations jumping onto the texting bandwagon to encourage people to text more.

n00bs!

Only n00bs get sore thumbs! L33t text0rz have phat, numb calluses!

It's the wrists

I got a Treo a couple weeks back, and while I love it overall, I've found that if I do much typing, my wrists start to hurt. (I seem to recall seeing this referred to before as "Blackberry Syndrome" or something?) My thumbs, however, are fine. I wonder if there's a risk for carpal tunnel from prolonged use?

OT: Giving people unlimited data but charging for text messages is asinine.

UK texting is cheaper than US texting- duh.

I live in the US.
I text, but it costs me more than a regular phone call (entirely dependent on your plan).
My experience is that 'SMSing' in the UK and Europe is *cheaper* than a phone call, while the opposite is true in the US.
Why is it more expensive in the US if the bandwidth usage is less??? WHY?
It's because it's a "cool feature", that's why.

'In Network' calls on my plan are included in my plan fee, yet I must pay extra to use less bandwidth.

Wrong

Ummm, according to CTIA, more than 7 billion texts are sent per month in the US (approx 235 million per month):

http://files.ctia.org/pdf/Wireless_Quick_Facts_Oct ober_05.pdf [ctia.org]

text messaging vs. email

If cell phones made using email as quick and easy as text messaging, would texting have ANY advantages over email? It seems like texting was invented just so the cell companies didn't have to support REAL email. I wish they would abolish texting altogether and do it the right way.

Sore Thumb's?

I've had that problem every Mon-Wed-Fri [sorethumbsonline.com] for months now.

--

1101010010010001111100100101000

Re:Incorrect multiplication?

I think it's supposed to be 700 billion, if not, only roughly 2 million text messages are being sent per day in america, which doesn't seem right.

Actually....

Also got units wrong, UK does 93 millon a day, whereas they say the US does 700 million a year... that means its incredibly *unpopular* in the US (unless it is a typo... from context, it probably is)

Re:Incorrect multiplication?

In that case, shouldnt it be 93 million * 5 * 365 = ~170 billion text messages a year?

What, are they trying to say that Americans dont have the text messaging skills that they do??

Re:Incorrect multiplication?

Read the slashdot editor's writeup again. He's comparing 93 million messages per day versus 700 million messages per year.

That's not twice as often. It's less than 1/100th as often.

Re:Americans are wealthier

Wealth has little to do with it -- In the US, at least in my area, most carriers charge ten cents per text!

I pay $55 a month for my cell phone. I don't pay per minute (e.g. I can talk all day long, all month long) and I don't pay for long distance (I can talk to someone clear across the country all day long)

Texting would COST ME MORE MONEY. No thanks.