UK Young People Prefer SMS to Voice Calls

The BBC recently reported that SMS has eclipsed voice calls as the most common use of mobile phones among young people in the United Kingdom. A survey by the CCP Group, an company that underwrites personal insurance policies against loss of mobile phones, indicated that more than eight out of ten people under the age of 25 are more likely to send someone a text message than to call. At the other end of the age scale, just 14% of those aged over 55 said they preferred to text. Mobile phone text messaging has more than doubled in the U.K. since March 2002, with 24 billion sent annually, a rate of more than 65 million per day in a nation of 60 million people. The Gartner Group last year reported that SMS has exceeded e-mail as the most popular form of telecommunications among Europeans, particularly so in the UK where 49 percent of adults use SMS compared to 39 percent who use e-mail.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.