Textaphrenia, post-traumatic text disorder, textiety, binge texting are other maladies that await the text-addicted, Australian researcher Jennie Carroll said yesterday.
Carroll, of Melbourne's RMIT University, was commenting on figures from service provider Boost Mobile that SMS traffic had almost doubled in volume since 2008.
One of its teenage customers was averaging 444 messages a day.
Among the possible downsides of SMSing, outlined by Carroll:
Textaphrenia is the mistaken belief that you have heard the beep of an incoming SMS.
Post-traumatic text disorder is when texters walk into things or become oblivious to what is around them.
Textiety is the crisis of confidence when time goes by without an SMS being received, while Binge texting is the sending a blizzard of SMSes to boost confidence.
"With textaphrenia and textiety, there's a feeling 'no one loves me, no one's contacted me'," Carroll said.
She said binge texting could either reflect the delusion you had more friends than you actually had, or be a cry for help. "You think you've been left out of the loop so you send a lot of texts and wait for the response," Carroll said. - Sapa-dpa
