Text messaging is extremely prevalent in today's society and has affected the lives of the current generation in a multitude of ways. The impact of texting may be difficult to determine quantitatively, however it is contributing to an ongoing evolution in how humans communicate with each other through its effects on written language, grammar, and the purpose that cell phones serve. This paper will show how texting is contributing to social norms, linguistic change, and sociological impacts among youth in America and some of the reasons why these changes are occurring. Texting celebrated its 20th birthday on December 3, 2012. That makes text messaging more than 20 years old, although most people would be surprised to know that. SMS was conceived by Friedhelm Hillebrand in Germany after he wrote a series of random messages and counted the characters contained in each message. He found that each message contained approximately 160 characters, which would long become the standard for the length of a text message. Hillebrand made his discovery in 1984, but the first message was sent nearly 10 years later, on December 3, 1992. It simply said "Merry Christmas" and the recipient had no way to respond because his phone was incapable of sending a message . Early versions of messages were sent by a system known as the Short Messaging Service and would not receive the nickname "text" until Nokia released a mobile phone capable of sending and receiving messages in 1993. (Gayomali 2012) The SMS was very limited initially by several factors that prevented it from catching on. One of the limiting factors was that to send a text message users had to be on the same mobile network, which severely limited the number of people next to each other... middle of paper......and explain the pros and cons of such dependence. Illiteracy is a serious problem that must be solved if adolescents are to become responsible adults capable of being taken seriously by their older peers. Other teens need to be made aware that while they may think Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are private, they are not and anything they write can be seen and used against them. Finally, teens should learn to emphasize authentic connections with others that will lead to deep, meaningful friendships and relationships. These are valuable and important things that are being devalued by cell phone culture, which has been largely assisted by text messaging. To combat these things it is necessary to take measures to broaden the horizons of youth culture and bring it back into the real world, so to speak, where people matter more than a number..