To see a video on students’ messaging mishaps, click here.
To read an article about Google’s new feature to end drunk e-mailing, click here.
This generation of University students has made multitasking the norm. They come to college with flying fingers, texting or e-mailing any piece of information — or gossip — that comes their way. But sometimes that combination causes problems.”I have a friend who hates his job, and he was texting another friend to tell him that he hates his boss and wants to quit. But somehow he was sending the same messages to his boss,” said Mansi Vaishnav, biology senior. “He called her an ‘f-ing bitch.'”Vaishnav said her friend didn’t get fired, but his boss called a meeting with the whole staff to discuss any issues they may have with the    management. He was embarrassed because everyone knew it was caused by his text message. James Honeycutt, communication studies professor, said when people “accidentally” send a text message to a person they are talking badly about, it could be a form of subliminal retribution caused by internal anger.”It is plausible that there is a ‘Freudian death wish,’ a way of relieving frustration even though at a conscious level they didn’t mean to do that,” he said. Lauren Ainsworth, physical therapy sophomore, said she had a breakup with a former boyfriend over a wrongly addressed text message.”I was avoiding my then-boyfriend and texting my friends plans about what we were doing that night,” she said. “My boyfriend sent me a text that popped up while I was texting my friends [and he got the same message], and he got mad that I was going out without him. He showed up where I went, and we got in a fight … and broke up over it.”Honeycutt said this kind of “repressed retribution” text message could be a subconscious effort by the sender to signal discontent.But giving another person clues about feeling irritated doesn’t always have negative effects. Elizabeth Pearce, undecided freshman, said when she and her boyfriend were fighting, an accidental text to him helped them work out their problems.”My boyfriend and I were in a fight, and I was trying to send my best friend a text telling her I didn’t think [our relationship] was going to last as long as I thought it would,” Pearce said. “But she is two spaces below my boyfriend [in my address book], and I accidentally sent it to him.”Pearce said after the initial confusion, they discussed their problems and agreed to work on them and are still together.  The human brain processes information by noticing similarities and related things, said Emily Elliott, associate psychology professor. If a student sends a text message about someone to a different person, it’s highly likely their brain will make the connection to the person the information is about and send it to them instead.Saundra Daigle, a Baton Rouge psychologist, said mistakes are possible in any kind of communication, but they don’t always have a subliminal meaning. She said if a text message is sent to the wrong person, it could be because the sender was thinking of the recipient and inadvertently sent it them. But the problem could also be as simple as a technical error relating to their cell phone.Vaishnav said her sister was talking to a man and unintentionally sent a text message to him after their conversation, instead of to the correct recipient.”My sister texted a guy that had feelings for her and asked if he wanted to go out that night, but she meant to text a different guy that she liked,” Vaishnav said. “She didn’t like the guy she sent the text to, but she had basically asked him out, so she had to explain the situation to him.”Vaishnav said the situation got complicated when her sister explained the situation to the man she accidentally texted because he felt like she was leading him on, so she felt obligated to go on a couple dates with him. Honeycutt said it’s easy for students to get overwhelmed because of multiple focuses and tasks. He said students frequently send text messages and e-mails to more than one person simultaneously and getting the recipients confused is very likely.”I accidentally asked one of my guy friends how his morning sickness was going once,” said Emily George, mass communication junior. “I was talking to my other friend, who is pregnant, and I just got them mixed up.”Honeycutt said there’s a strong possibility of sending an e-mail to an unintentional audience, especially with the “reply to all” feature. Recipients of a mass e-mail may accidentally press “reply to all,” either because they didn’t know the original message was also sent to other people or because they aren’t aware of the difference between “reply” and “reply to all,” he said.To solve these sometimes-embarassing problems, many students said they have made it a habit to check their text messages and e-mails before they press send.”I’ve sent text messages to people’s houses on accident two times,” said Melissa Morales, music education sophomore. “After the first time, I started checking before I sent, but it happened again anyway.”—-Contact Ellen Zielinski at [email protected]