Talk about texting : Attitudes towards mobile phones

More than half the world’s population now has access to mobile phones. While these devices enable spoken communication, many users (especially teenagers and young adults) heavily employ them for sending and receiving written text messages. There is a growing literature on the linguistic features of text messages, but much less is objectively known about user attitudes towards texting (or towards mobile phones in general). Drawing upon data from a cross-cultural mobile phone project involving university students in Sweden, the US, Italy, Japan, and Korea, this study examines user perspectives on mobile communication, with special emphasis on texting functions.