Meek New World

In a second, I'm going to be the five-billionth person to talk about technology and how it's changed our lives. So, you know, brace yourselves for innovation.
As has slowly become more and more apparent, my natural inclination is to introversion. This is only fractionally surprising because I had about a 6-7 year run starting in college during which time I was pretty legitimately extroverted. Basically all my life before and after this sustained bout of openness has been what I now clearly deem to be my true state of being.
It's not that I don't like people or that I don't enjoy being around them, it's just that usually I don't need other people, and in fact I not-infrequently prefer to be totally alone. Additionally, in most instances when a decision could be made to do something either more or less socially, I will almost always choose the "less."
Anyhow, this fancy thing called the text message just happens to allow me to much more easily be myself.
People surely remember what it was like to communicate without text messages. You actually had to speak to someone else, like verbally. And you had to listen at the same time. It was weird. And awkwardly intimate. If someone was your friend, you had to call him on the phone to make plans to see him, plus you'd inevitably have to exchange pleasantries while doing so. There would be no sports or asinine commercials on the TV to use as a social crutch. And assuming you were trying to get together more than just one other person (again, the group setting to be used as a social crutch), you'd have to repeat this verbal conversation several times, likely even more than once for a couple of individuals. The horror, indeed.
My own personal timeline with this is a little bit undescriptive because wholesale texting started not too long after I left college and clearly my social dynamic was changing a lot at that time anyway, but I can pretty easily say that I communicate directly with far more people now than I did pre-text.
As long as you don't engage in many one-on-one dinners or conversations with people, it's much easier to maintain seemingly meaningful friendships in the texting world. I'm probably a little outside the meaty part of the bell curve on this, but think about your own list of regular communicators. I dare you to tell me that you would talk all of those people as regularly if you actually had to talk to them every time. No chance.
When you are in college, you have lots of "friends" who are such largely because of ease and proximity. They aren't actually your friends, because as soon as you or they move away you stop talking to them. Sure, it's easy to reconnect every once in a while and you would probably still get along fine, but they aren't on your speed dial. There are certain people who are your friends in college who truly are your friends and you in fact do keep in at least semi-regular contact with them afterwards, but there are more who you don't.
The text message allows a lot of those people who are fringe friends to stay in your inner circle. They aren't simply proximate friends like in college but their existence is your life is just as lazy for you. Because you don't have to really invest or engage or share those awkwardly intimate moments of direct one-on-one verbal communication, your dissimilarity or true standing with each other never has to be confronted. The text message lets us all be cowards. Which is fine with me, as long as I don't have to tell you that to your face, with actual spoken words.