Wendy Branzburg was getting antsy. Her twin sons, Max and Eli, sophomores at Princeton and Muhlenberg, respectively, were scheduled to come home for winter break the same day. She wanted to be a good mom, to cook their favorite dinners, and to have the food hot when they walked in the door.
"My husband, Mort, and I had no idea when either of them was actually coming home," said Branzburg of Bala Cynwyd. "Of course, we discussed it several times, with the answer always being, 'I'll let you know.' "
They did - an hour before they arrived. Their late notice was the end of their mother's culinary homecoming plans.
"I suppose that's the dilemma in 2009. Parents like to plan, and their kids don't even know how to plan."
The ubiquity of cell phones and text messaging, especially among young people, has changed the whole idea of the word plans - most significantly, it allows people not to make any.
"One of the consequences of the mobile phone is that you can postpone any decision until the last minute," said James E. Katz, chair of the Rutgers University communications department, where he directs the Center for Mobile Communications Studies. "Since you have up to that last minute to obtain information for the decision, cell phones can give you the opportunity to delay it. What do you want for dinner? Hmmm, I'll tell you when I am really hungry."
Allison Stadd, a University of Pennsylvania senior, said she has one standing plan - to watch Gossip Girl on Monday nights with her seven roommates. Other than that, it's off-the-cuff for everything.
"Because of the instantaneous nature of text messaging, and especially BlackBerry messaging, which is the cell-phone equivalent of instant messaging on the computer, kids in my generation feel less and less compelled to commit ahead of time to any plan," Stadd said.
Fellow Penn student Noah Rosenstein claims to be a bit more organized. During the winter break, he attempted to make plans "early" - in the morning for the rest of the day. "Some days nothing ever worked out," he lamented.
The nonchalance about making plans has created a morass for people who depend on others keeping their appointments, said Margaret McCoey, an assistant professor of math and computer science at La Salle University. McCoey, who studies mass communications, said students in the last few years - when cell-phone use has burgeoned - increasingly don't show up for appointments with her.
"I think part of it is that they don't now value personal interaction," said McCoey, positing that a text message may be, to many, equal to a face-to-face appointment - which is to say, not all that important. "I don't know where this is going, but it is a little scary," she said.
Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers-Camden, is not nearly as worried, saying that the late-planning habit, especially for young people, started at least a generation ago, or even before, with the countercultural 1960s and '70s.
"There was a value of being spontaneous and free of entanglements," said Goertzel, 66, whose own children, now 43 and 39, weren't big on making long-term plans when they were younger. In comparison, when he and his wife were younger, she had to know Tuesday what they were doing Saturday.
"Even with wired telephones, there was a lot of last-minute communication," he said. "It might also be cyclical, a matter of generational culture, an 'uptight' generation followed by a 'laid-back' one."
Still, there is a notion that the no-plans phenomenon is expanding, if ever so slowly, into the middle-aged cadre.
Marc Vetri, the owner of two popular Philadelphia restaurants, Vetri and Osteria, said his staff takes a lot of last-minute wait-listers via cell phone. In the past, if someone blew off, say, an 8:30 reservation, Vetri would just let it go. But because people now are willing to switch gears quickly, he said, his restaurants take cell-phone numbers from hopeful diners and call them, even minutes before the table will be available. Someone could be waiting in line at another restaurant, but when they are called from, say, Osteria, people pick up and move on.
Even courting and sexual encounters are more impromptu, according to La Salle sociology and criminal justice professor Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus (New York University Press, 2008). While the "hook-up" culture preceded cell phones, men or women looking for some company were at least expected to show up in person and do some convincing. Now, said Bogle, the "booty call" may come by text message at 2 a.m. for a tryst 10 minutes later.
"The generation before would be insulted by that and never respond positively," she said. "Today, since communications and planning for everything is so instantaneous, it's more like, 'Oh, good, she/he is thinking about me.' It's turned from an insult to, if not a compliment, at least a regular kind of thing."
Yet even cell-phone calls are losing popularity, as young adults become increasingly reliant on texting.
Talking on the phone requires at least some commitment, said Drexel communications professor Alan Zemel. You've got to pay a bit of attention, note the inflections of voice on the other line, and make proper inflections of your own. Worse, you have to stop what you are doing and worry about who might be listening to you making your plans. Text messaging makes communication easier to transition in and out of, and it's more private.
"You certainly don't read a text the way you read Dostoyevsky. It's cursory, good for quick plans. You can start generating plans the moment something comes up and you can text a lot of people at once," Zemel said, noting that the best way for him to reach his own teenage daughter is to text her. "She won't answer the phone. It has changed the face of parenting. There are environments where a kid can't answer the phone, like in school, and others where they just won't because they have peer-related concerns around friends. With a text, they can get one from me and fake like it's from another friend."
Penn student Rebekah Caton has virtually given up using her cell phone as a phone to plan anything, even with her most intimate friends.
"My boyfriend and I have yet to speak on the phone. We only text," she said - not by phone, to be sure, but by e-mail. "And we're dating. Yes, we understand that this is a bit messed up."
