Traditional phone calls are being killed off by SMS messages, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apparently humanity has lost interest in actually communicating and is instead trying to say all it needs too in short SMS messages.

While this is marginally better than grunting and hitting someone over the head with a club, it does indicate that perhaps technology is dumbing humanity down in the same way that Big Brother did in the 90s. Beancounters at Nielsen, at the request of The Wall Street Journal, analyzed cellphone bills of 60,000 mobile subscribers.

The early looks at Nielson's figures were all about how teens were spending so much time texting people. It apparently was easier to “tut tut” about that then look at the more dramatic changes which were happening.

The figures found adults made and received an average of 188 mobile phone calls a month in the 2010 period, down 25 per cent from the same period three years earlier. Average monthly "talk minutes" fell 5 per cent for the period compared with 2009; among 18- to 24-year-olds, the decline was 17 per cent. Adults sent and received 323 texts a month in the second quarter of 2010, up 75 per cent from a year ago, Nielsen says.

The WSJ thinks that texting is considered less of an invasion of someone's time than is calling. This resolves a big problem that people have with mobile communication. They like the fact that they can contact people, they just don't like people contacting them. Texts resolve that problem.