So THAT'S what a data package is

Until this very morning, I believed that a "data package" was a package of technical tools used to access the Internet through a cellphone.

In fact, I realized this morning, the "data package" is the data itself. For so many dollars a month – a package price – cellphone users buy the right to send so many texts, or tweets, or whatever.

In fairness to myself, I did not have a "need to know." I neither text nor tweet, nor willingly call anyone on a cellphone. My wife and son, however, text, but infrequently, because she says each text costs a dollar and something.

"My God," I say, "I just read a report that the average smartphone user texts 3,500 times a month! How can they afford that?"

My wife looks at me like I was a 19th-century painting. "Because they buy data packages," she says. This morning, drinking coffee, watching the sun come up, I made the connection: you can pay a dollar something per text, or you can buy a data package for $40 a month and send 3,500 texts.

I suppose I'll tell my students about this; it's always good to start the class with a laugh. In one class of 30 students, 28 of them have smartphones, either an iPhone or a Droid. That means in my class I have 28 individuals equipped to become global media publishers, once they acquire a few principles of journalism, photography, video, audio, and editing, or even if they don't.

I saw a report on one of the Sunday morning news magazine shows wondering if humanity should be worried when people become obsessive of their smartphones. After all, 3,500 texts divided by 31 days is 113 texts a day, or a fraction over seven texts an hour in 16 waking hours.

In class, up until last year, I used to vent my worry about this obsession by walking to the desk of a student in mid-text, smiling into the student's blue face (you can see the smartphone reflected in their eyes, when they come up to meet yours), and saying, "You're going to make an A in texting and an F in journalism."

No more. Because in the past year, I have witnessed evidence that students are learning to text and pay attention at the same time. Is that a worry? I don't know. It does align with an argument I starting making at least five years ago, that 20 years from now, two images, one entertainment, the other advertising, will be interlaced somehow and shown on a screen simultaneously, and not just students, but all of us, will be able to separate and comprehend both images at the same time.

That may turn out to be a worry, but it shouldn't come as a surprise. Vast reaches of the human brain remain unused, because so little of that capacity has been needed in the last half a million years. Now it is learning to text and pass journalism at the same time, which, I must say, is phenomenal to observe. My brain, having only today made the data package connection, is far behind, but I am confident that it could text, blog and comprehend simultaneous entertainment/advertising content, all at the same time, if it ever wanted to.