text work as identity work; txt worx as identtt worx

Texting as a marker of identity?
Risks in saying young people are like this, do this... it negates the variations.
However, this didnt stop the latest Pew report from doing an analysis of online behaviours based on age. Generations online challenges some common assumptions, while creating others.
Look at this:
95% of teens communicate face to face (no idea what the other 5% do)
88% of teens use landline
67% talk to friends on cell phones
58% send text messages to friends
Please note these are USA stats, but so to is Sherry Turkle's research suggesting how damaging texting is for teenagers, and suggesting how detrimental this is to their emotional development.
Taking a Pew quiz on use of communication technologies had me typecast as a digital collaborator. Ok. I enjoy working with what affords me a means to communicate quickly, in a timely way, with whats at hand, for what it is good for. Doesn't mean its a fixed trait.Doesn't mean I have lost my ability to discern what its more or less good for. I'm actually now more concerned about what it means for me to be seen as a collaborator...didnt they get shot during WW2?

BTW there is an excellent article by Barbara Kramer and Pat Thompson on doctoral writing as text work and identity work. A sampler:
where the novice researcher enters what we call occupied territory – with all the immanent danger and quiet dread that this metaphor implies – including possible ambushes, barbed wire fences, unknown academics who patrol the boundaries of already occupied territories. It is difficult to write confidently in dangerous territory.

My own writing as identity work is evolving, the conventions of the academy restrict the creativity, you might say fortunately.
I'm not brave enough to write the first txt spk thesis
mmmmm
If it didnt have a word limit imposed i might have considered a bilingual one.
:)