If you think about it, posting to this forum has a lot of parallels with texting.
Would we pick up the phone to have a conversation about all these things - no. You wouldn't get enough people together on the line at one time for it to work. Posting, email and texting are non-synchronous forms of communication. Phones are synchronous, you both (or all for a conf call) have to be there at the exact same time. A post or text can wait a minute, an hour, or days for a response. You can text a group.
I rarely ever text, but I occasionally send them through the computer to the kids phones (email to ###-###-####@tmomail.net or whatever your carrier's addy is). That way, they can answer (if needed, sometimes I'm just giving them some info they asked for earlier) when they are out of class, or when convenient, whatever. In may ways, texts make a lot of sense.
What bugs me is the oligopoly power allows them to charge exorbitant fees for a text. The data in a text is equivalent to a fraction of a second of voice, and it can be delayed for several seconds w/o a problem, yet they charge about the same as 60 seconds of voice. That is hundreds of times above what a free market rate would be. And no un-metered off-peak rates either.
-ERD50