Beware textaphrenia or textiety

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Textaphrenia, post-traumatic text disorder, textiety, binge texting are other maladies that await the text-addicted, Australian researcher Jennie Carroll said Wednesday.

Carroll, of Melbourne’s RMIT University, was commenting on figures from phone service provider Boost Mobile that text traffic had almost doubled in volume since 2008.

One of Boost’s teenage customers was averaging 444 messages a day.

Among the possible downsides of texting, outlined by Carroll:

1. Textaphrenia: the mistaken belief that you have heard the beep or felt the vibration of an incoming text message.
2. Post-traumatic text disorder: when texters walk into things or are otherwise oblivious to what is around them.
3. Textiety: the crisis of confidence when time goes by without a text being received.
4. Binge texting: sending a blizzard of texts to boost confidence.

“With textaphrenia and textiety, there’s a feeling no one loves me, no one’s contacted me,” Carroll told the Herald Sun newspaper.

She said binge texting can either reflect the delusion you have more friends than you actually have or be a cry for help.

“You think you’ve been left out of the loop so you send a lot of texts and wait for the response,” Carroll said.

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