What works
What I like most about this graphic is that it summarizes great research from Pew that many folks would not have perused by reading Pew’s publicly available reports. That’s always one of the reasons I tout information graphics – they make information accessible and interesting to people who don’t have the drive/access/time to read full reports and the graphics often give more detail than do executive summaries. Clearly, any summary cannot give all the granularity of the report, but I assume most people do not read full reports. This comprehensive visual summary packs in more information than would a journalistic article about the research that have to include the requisite interview with a teen who texts or the parent who pays her bill or the person who was injured by a texting driver (or the guilty driver). Only sprinkled among the vox populi would we see a couple of quotes from a couple of ‘experts’ who conducted the survey. And nobody can summarize all that much in a total of four-ish quotes. I am still weighing the pros and cons of recommending that standard executive summaries be replaced by (accompanied by?) information graphics like this, at least in the case of survey-based reports.
Out with the written executive summary, in with the infographic summary? Please debate.
What needs work
I couldn’t find the actual references so I added some of my own where you can corroborate things like the Finnish PM who broke up with a girlfriend over text and the story of the first text message sent by Neil Papworth. My guess is that the bulk of the information comes from Pew while a lot of the fun facts come from the other sources. But I couldn’t find that out for sure without a great deal of effort (like tracing back every single datapoint in each of the components of this graphic).
The interwebs has a social policy of hyperlinking to sources. Please folks, keep that going someway, somehow. Otherwise we risk plagiarism which is bad in itself (see my dissertation 2011). Additionally, when it is not possible to check facts, exaggerations, methodological mistakes, made up info, and just plain lies are harder to ferret out.
References
Pew Internet and American Life Project
Report on Mobile Access (7 July 2010)
Report on Teens and Mobile Phones (20 April 2010)
shanesnow. (18 August 2010) “US and Worldwide Texting Trends” Original post at mashable.
Boyes, Roger. (14 March 2007) How potato love affair with Finnish PM went off the boil. The Sunday Times online.
BBC News Online. (3 December 2002) Hppy Bthdy Txt.
Comments 7
Matthew — August 19, 2010
Uh, how can teens who can't drive admit to texting while driving?
Angela — August 22, 2010
Textecution sounds like a great idea, for people of any age. Too bad it cant tell the difference between driving and being a passenger.
Arturo — August 25, 2010
I thought I read somewhere that studies show no noticeable difference between talking on the phone and using a handless device like a bluetooth phone, in terms of the cognitive impairment of driving and having a phone conversation. I would imagine the same dynamic would be true of audio texts, though I'm sure it would be a degree safer not having to physically type something out.
Also, in term of the difference between teens and adults who texts I also think the graphic is a bit misleading. You're right that many states the age of driving is 16 and sometimes 14, but I read that there's been a decline in the number of youth getting a driver's license in the last couple of years. Only 43% of teens have a license I read somewhere (I know I should be citing here, but it was an LA times article sometime ago). My point is that perhaps adults have a greater opportunity to text (have a phone and have a license) as compared to youth (a majority who don't drive) so the comparison is not quite fair. I would imagine if you could control for this teens may have equal if not greater relative levels of texting.
Anwyay, great post! and I enjoy the blog....we made it the society page of the week on the podcast
http://thesocietypages.org/officehours
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 24 (September 2010) « Quaerentia — September 1, 2010
[...] here’s a thing. In the west, for every text sent by adults, teenage boys send 3 and teenage girls send 10! So no surprises there, I [...]