Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

February 17, 2013

Sleep Texting is apparently on the Rise and is a ‘Crisis’

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:45 PM

Since my last post was about reading SMS messages while half asleep, I had to post about this article claiming sleep texting was on a rise (HuffingtonPost, CNet). Basically, teens are responding to Texts while half asleep and then not remembering doing this the next morning and this is apparently a crisis. I don’t agree that it is a crisis. It is the same thing as people picking up phone calls when half asleep and then not remembering it the next day (I used to be notorious for this in College). Or talking to someone in the room half asleep and not remembering it.

Earlier this week, a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia spoke with Dr. Elizabeth Dowdell, a professor of nursing at Villanova University, who believes that more and more teens may be texting in their sleep

“It’s something new. We’re just starting to get a handle on it,” Dowdell told The Huffington Post. “I think that we will start to see more of this as cell phones become much more accessible at all ages.”

With sleep texting, the beep of a cell phone lightly awakens a person, so he or she will reach over and respond to a message (sometimes with jibberish). However, the person has no memory of having done so in the morning.

The best part is that the Doctor who started all this drama (Dowdell) hasn’t even conducted proper research on this, it’s based on anecdotal evidence that is blown out of proportion by the media who wanted a headline and what better one than protecting the kids from themselves! Just because texting is a technology that mostly kids use and adults don’t like, doesn’t make this a crisis and to use it as an excuse to shove more pills down the poor kids throats is not right.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later (maybe in my sleep).

– Suramya

February 13, 2013

Lesson learnt: don’t read sms’s when half asleep

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 2:58 AM

So I learned an important lesson today: it’s a bad idea to read an incoming SMS
when I’m half asleep. I don’t remember reading the SMS or what it says and it’s marked as read so when I wake up I still don’t read it.

Ah well… Things you learn…

– Suramya

February 10, 2013

Why I don’t twitter and why people who Twitter should be careful.

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:24 PM

For the longest time I thought Twitter was useless and had pretty much decided never to use it, but then I used it recently when my Airtel account was giving issues to reach out to their head office and had a good response. At that time I seriously considered starting to post stuff on Twitter but then changed my mind about it. By now you must be wondering (if you actually read the post till here) why am I talking about Twitter like its a new technology, its not. It was just something I was thinking about so decided to write it (plus I was getting tired of lying in bed sick). Basically I realized that if I started posting on Twitter then a lot of the stuff I write about can be taken in the wrong context and potentially get me in trouble.

When you are posting a blog posting or an article, it’s well over 255 characters long and it takes you time and effort to type it out, think through the point you are making etc (for example I will probably re-write this post a couple of times before I click publish). Twitter is meant to be quick, a note to self or random thought that you share with the world. This is both the beauty and danger of Twitter, it makes it so easy to post something in the spur of the moment that you might regret later when you think about it. A sarcastic comment in a three para blog post has a lot of context around it and is hard to misquote, but on twitter that’s all you see and since there is no context it can be taken any way and given whatever context people want.

For example, if I have a bad day in the train and post a blog post about it and then as part of the post/explanation say something about blowing it up to make something better then people wouldn’t have an issue. However if I made a post on Twitter saying something like “Train Commutes suck, all trains should be blown up to make room for something better” then it sends a completely different message and can potentially get folks arrested. In past comments made on Twitter have gotten people deported, arrested etc. Plus with my sense of humor, I need as much room as possible to explain the context without getting into trouble.

We this is all for now. Will post more later. (and yes hopefully the updates will be more frequent)

– Suramya

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