Today, if youngsters are asked what their number one, must-have item, the answer would be a mobile phone, which is absolutely essential to maintaining relationships these days.

What is fascinating is how people use these phones. Apparently there are two kinds of mobile phone users: texters and talkers. I learnt this from a research paper written by university professors Donna Reid & Fraser Reid of the University of Plymouth, UK.

The Reids looked into the phone habits of various people and their findings confirmed what other researchers and ordinary people long believed. Some people like to text and others like to talk.

Their research focused on the texters and the duo noticed important and possibly disturbing differences between those who prefer texting to talking.

In brief, they found that texters had set up communities built around text messaging platforms. Most of the messages that texters sent had nothing to do with informational or practical purposes. Instead they were used to establish and maintain social contacts within fairly well-defined and close-knit groups of friends.

Their text messages appeared to fulfill a social-relational function - big words that say that texters are living their lives using SMS.

They are making friends, maintaining relationships and having and breaking love affairs via SMS messages. Recently, a girl with a broken heart committed suicide after sending a "see you around" SMS to her close friend. In India, another girl proudly claims that her relationship began, flourished and ended entirely over the SMS.

This is not as uncommon as many of you might think. I asked a teenager how many friends he has whom he has never met in real life but only through SMS. He came up with more than 10 names.

While researching for this column, I came across a website that’s dedicated to helping people look for SMS friends. It had thousands of postings.

I am worried that an increasingly number of people live their lives via mobile phones. Even more worrying is that the younger a person is the bigger the chance that the person is a texter.

That’s not all. The Reids discovered that texters were found to be more lonely and socially anxious than talkers. They were uncomfortable and unwilling to disclose their real personalities in face-to-face conversations.

Texting allowed them to express their real feelings safely without being seen in person. Most of the texters who responded to the study also said that people close to them in real life (family members etc) would be surprised if they happened to read their text messages.

That’s called living two lives and in my books, it could be a mental health issue.

The professors did not venture an opinion as to why people become texters but I have a theory. It is related to the lack of a real community life. In a real community, people live in the same area, play in the same playgrounds and go to the same schools.

The reality today is that the basic components that make up community are missing. Without a proper community and interesting real life activities, young people who have never known a physical community are forced to look for communities they can identify with elsewhere.

Of course the mobile phone industry benefits from this phenomenon. They are cashing in by lowering SMS rates and even creating virtual communities for texters to congregate in.

As to whether it will result in a generation we will be proud of remains to be seen. Let me rephrase that. We won’t see them actually. We will have to join them in textland to find out how they are faring.