Texting is much in the news these days, especially after Nielsen released its finding that teens send and receive an average of 2,272 text messages each month. The New York Times reported on the phenomenon, as has The Washington Post, Scientific American, and a thousand blogs across the country.

Texting even has entered the realm of competition, with the LA U.S. National Texting Championship offering $50,000 to the winner. This year it was a young lady from Des Moines (see here), a 15-year-old who runs up 14,000 texts each month and advises parents, “let [kids] text during dinner! It pays off!” More than 250,000 tried to enter the contest this year.

It’s not all social stuff, we are assured. One thing the winner does is use texting to study for exams with pals, the story notes. So do lots of other kids, although the meaning of “use” may be said to vary.

Here we read a story in eSchoolNews with an alarming headline: “Students say using tech to cheat isn’t cheating.” A poll commissioned by Common Sense Media found that “more than a third of teens with cellphones (35 percent) admit to cheating at least once with them, and two-thirds of all teens (65 percent) say others in their school cheat with them.” They store information on cell phones before entering the classroom to take a test. Fully 25 percent of them text answers to their friends while the test is taking place. One out of five use their phones to surf the Web for answers. And nearly half of them use their phones to call friends to warn them of pop quizzes. Just over half admit to cheating in one way or another using their devices.

Here’s the doubly-worrisome part: “Many students do not consider this behavior as cheating.” Only 16 percent admitted that calling or texting friends to warn them of a pop quiz is, indeed, a violation. More than one-third claimed that “downloading a paper from the Internet was not a serious offense, and 42 percent said copying text from Web sites was a either a minor offense or not cheating at all.”

Old-style schoolmasters fret, but isn’t this just a matter of quick-witted teenagers living out “the death of the author”? Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of “participatory culture”? In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the definition of cheating. Right?

(Photo by Flickr user Cinnamon)