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If you have teenagers in your house, you may find this hard to believe, but texting is on the decline.


For the first time ever, traditional texting — the kind you do through your cell phone provider — has dropped in Britain. That's according to 

 from Deloitte, which reported that the number of text messages passed around by Brits decreased by 7 billion last year.


Instead, the company predicts, people in the U.K. will send around 300 billion instant messages in 2014. That's the kind of messaging that requires an app and uses the Internet. Old-fashioned texting is only expected to account for about 140 billion messages.

 tells NPR's Lynn Neary. A media and marketing professor at Emerson College, Richard says people are increasingly using apps to send messages, even though texting hasn't been around for that long. He proposes several reasons why:


It may seem too soon to talk about the good old days of texting, but technological turnover is another sign of the times.


"Texting really is just about a 20-year-old technology, and we're talking about it declining already," Richard says. "These are sort of the cycles that we're seeing in technology development."  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Science

Instant messaging has surpassed old-fashioned texts. Also on the decline: phone numbers.

Texting is becoming 'old-school'

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