Now you’ll have to take what I say with a grain of salt here since disclosure demands that I admit that I do not have and have never had a child. In spite of behaving like one from time to time I’m thus forced to also admit that I don’t have the parenting experience that would make me an authority on the topic, either. However I’ve seen enough kids and have enough friends with that affliction (just kidding) that I do at least have a reasonably well developed opinion on kids with mobile phones and it is this: they do “think different”.

Just read a family of four’s mobile bill and you can see what I mean: Mom 1032 minutes of voice 2 incoming text messages, Dad, 764 minutes of voice, 0 text messages, Tina age 16 2055 minutes of voice (yes, she’s grounded) and 547 text messages(for a year), Will age 13 27 minutes of voice 445 text messages (Will will be mowing the lawn til he’s 60 to pay for his usage, “incidentally).

This is representative of a new paradigm unfolding right in front of our eyes. Kids are using mobile phones as instant messengers or status devices. They have the ability to maintain a near constant “back channel” connection with their principal friends even as they talk on a land-line or engage in a meat-space conversation. In some sense I think we’re witnessing a quasi evolutionary change in terms of the human ability to multi-task.

The truth is that as adults virtually all of us are terrible multi-taskers. We’re fairly adept at quickly switching from one activity to another a thousand times during a typical day but truth be told most of us can only really do one thing at a time; or at least one thing well at a time. From my observations kids seem to be overcoming this limitation and this is particularly evident in how they use their mobile phones.

Not only are many of these mini-robo-sapiens able to text message using multi-tap or T9 by touch, they can do so while engaged in a intense conversation with someone at the other end of a phone that is being cradled between said cy-child’s ear and shoulder - her other hand being erstwhile engaged manipulating the PS3 controller to blast alien hordes from the black sky; protecting earth being a trivial task compared to a really hard game like Halo. What makes this even more impressive is that it’s clear this advanced new life form isn’t even breaking a metaphorical sweat while carrying on all these tasks. In fact, so remedial is the game that she can beat the computer in spite of the fact that because of how she’s holding the phone she is actually viewing the display sideways!

You may think I am exaggerating perhaps? Well, you can try to stave off those Freudian feelings of insecurity by denying reality or perhaps sign up for a cybernetic-multi-tasking implant that can bring you up a notch or two on this brave new evolutionary scale. Either that (hopefully they’ll be available in the next few years) or else face the reality that we’re going to fall further and further behind this somewhat terrifying generation of digital demigods. Maybe we’ll be fortunate and they’ll treat us with respect and compassion sort of like cherished antiques. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, when they speak to us they’ll do so using methods and devices we can understand - and slowly - after all it should be obvious that people THAT BUSY can’t possibly be bothered to repeat themselves just because WE don’t get it…

Truthfully, I’m not certain if Darwin would have used the word “evolution” to describe this change in ability from one generation to the next but then again, perhaps he would have. Another truth is that a lot of us aging “uni-taskers” find this multi-tasking “constant partial attention” - as my friend Marc Orchant calls it - very annoying. In fact at times I find this behavior so annoying that it occurs to me that perhaps it’s a good thing that I don’t have children of my own. After all, there’s another word that Darwin knew that is much less ambiguous when put into action: extinction.

Author’s Note: The principal topic for this new community blog is Mobile Messaging 2.0. As such, it falls to me and the other authors writing here to discuss as wide an array of technologies and methods as we can. The brief accounting above is but one glance into a not too far distant where our kids have surpassed our command of the digital domain and are the true controller of the Mobile Messaging 2.0 Medium.