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  Hello! I am merlin). I had never quite caught onto the texting craze before entering college, and now seem to text endlessly because "all my friends do it." How frustrating it seems that some parents will just never be able to understand how sending 1500 messages in one month is even physically possible "Dad, 1500 isn't even that many compared to everyone else! It takes you 20 minutes to send just ONE" Long story short, the advent of the cell phone and the text message has been very important to my social and even sometimes academic world. It proves useful for the quick and efficient transmission of knowledge and information. However being part of a generation that was on the cusp of a technological explosion, I can look at cell phones and texting from a time when it wasn't around. I have had the experience of having a relationship with a person or two from a distance and have relied upon the text message as the primary source of communication. Unfortunately, I've come to realize that although it's important, texting comes at the risk of replacing a person with your imaginary visualization of that person. You're not talking to Betty or Tom or Stephanie anymore, you're talking to a machine. Sometimes I find myself not imagining that person himself saying the words on the screen, and sometimes this dilemma may even cause confusion and misunderstanding. One is more likely to place his or her own (sometimes incorrect) interpretation onto a text message more easily. Over time, I have come to see my relationship with this form of technology as love/hate.