This week Bettina and I sat down with two students to talk to them about their texting patterns, habits, and language. Prior to interviewing the students, we scripted an introduction that explained our project to the interviewee and obtained their verbal consent. Below is the introduction we will be using in all of our interviews.
“Thanks for agreeing to participate in this study. We will ask you 10 questions, and this interview will take about 30 minutes. You may skip any questions you do not wish to answer, and you may end the interview at any time. Your responses may be used in a future podcast. We may use your comments in reports on this research, but no personally identifying information will be shared. Also, feel free to take your time to answer these questions. Don’t feel pressured to fill the silence. If you’re ready, we’ll get started…”
We asked both students about visuals, punctuation, tone, and emotion. From here on out we will identify Student #1 as Kim and Student #2 as Will. Will thought using punctuations were unnecessary, especially because he believed his friends wouldn’t judge him for not using them. Kim predominantly used punctuation to express emotions such as excitement with exclamation points or confusion with question marks. Both Kim and Will used visuals (e.g. emojis, GIFs) to further clarify their text messages. I was surprised to learn that Will had only started using emojis after communicating with people who used them regularly. It reminded me of my recent adoption of using the phrase “lol” in text messages. I recently started using “lol” after I realized everyone in my group chat used it. Will’s linguistic adaptation, as well as mine, makes me question the evolution of texting language among millennials. How do millennials learn texting language? What style of texting language do we adopt or abandon, and why?
We also spoke to Will and Kim about the unwritten rules of texting. Kim said she doesn’t send back-to-back messages in a short period of time unless she knows the person on a personal level. Similar to Kim, Will said he hesitates sending a follow-up text message if the person has not responded to his first message. Timing was another unwritten rule Will adhered to when texting someone. He was conscious of who he was texting and what he was saying in his messages if the message was being sent late at night. For example, if a message says, “what’s up” and is received late at night, a lot of millennials interpret it as a sexual invitation. Will was careful with his words and timing because he did not want to give off the wrong impression.
I’m curious to learn more about the unwritten rules of text communication that millennials adhere to, and the origins of these rules. Bettina and I used a structured list of questions when interviewing Will and Kim, but we realized that if we wanted to create a podcast we needed more casual interviews. We decided that we would still use our list of questions when interviewing students; however, we plan on using it only as a reference so that our interviews with students were more of a flowing dialogue. Bettina and I also plan on sending out a formal email to students. We had initially planned on interviewing students in Professor Theo Greene’s Sociology 3010, but after reconsideration we thought it would be best to interview students outside of the class.