Texting Rather Than Talking

A new Census Bureau study indicates Americans clicked their way into more than 110 billion text messages last year.
That is double the number in the previous year - and it indicates that many people are preferring to send texts to making phone calls.
According to the report, there are 270 million cell phone subscribers - and each sent an average of 407 text messages last year.
That's more than twice the 188 messages sent in 2007.
The Census numbers don't get into the number of texts sent by age, though it's believed that teens tend to send many more texts than adults.
What make the numbers interesting is that the average length of a cell phone call dropped last year to 2.3 minutes.
That's the shortest amount of chat time since the 1990s, back when fewer people had cell phones and those who did had to keep close tabs on the minutes they used.