All good texts in moderation

For some of us, text messaging has become an integral part of our day. Want to get someone's attention during a meeting without disrupting what's going on? Send him or her a text. Want your significant other to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home from work? Fire off a text.

It's the perfect, compact, surreptitious missive of the day.

But it shouldn't, can't replace actual conversation.

With people texting to one another in short, abbreviated bursts all day it's no 1DR PEEPS HV NM to say when face to face. Evidence of that can be found when two people text each other in the same room ... or back seat.

For many of us, something that was created as a convenience has become an obsession. One that can have deleterious effects.

But don't trust us.

Listen to a 16-year-old.

Annie Levitz is a student at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire. She wears braces on both hands on days when the pain is severe.

At just 16 she was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. A rheumatologist determined her rampant texting caused the numbness, inflammation and pain in her wrists.

"It's scary, because it is probably going to have to result in surgery," she said.

Annie, by her own admission, was a hard case. She told Daily Herald staff writer Bob Susnjara that she texted as many as 3,500 to 4,000 times a month (yes, her folks had an unlimited texting plan). And that much of her texting amounted to frivolities.

And she managed to do all that texting while following Stevenson's strict rules against texting at school. She even took breaks for dinner.

"Never think (carpal tunnel) can't happen to you," she warns, "because it can."

Annie has weaned herself off texting to the point where she is down to 20 or 30 a day. That is, after her parents gave her phone back.

And she is preaching moderation to other high school kids who text a lot.

It's no secret that a primary reason childhood obesity is so out of control is that you don't burn off a lot of calories twiddling your thumbs.

Too much texting, like too much video game play, can isolate you and stultify you. We've all seen anecdotal evidence of that.

We've found no evidence that texting can kill you. Unless, of course, you do so while driving.

But it certainly shouldn't be done so much that it gets in the way of one's ability to relate a cohesive, complex thought, whether in spoken or written word.

Of course, we probably said the same thing about e-mail 10 years ago.