It’s their calling, er, texting card.
Fashion, vernacular and musical preferences aren’t the only cultural indicators of age. A digital wizard claims he can tell whether someone’s a boomer, millennial or Generation Z solely based on how they text.
“This is how you can tell someone’s age by how they type on their phone,” declared tech influencer Tyler Morgan in a TikTok clip with more than 2.7 million views.
He then proceeds to rattle off the telltale signs of each like the digital equivalent of a wine vintner determining a tipple’s vintage.
According to the clip, captioned, “How old do you text,” anyone who’s “using swipe to text” is most likely a millennial — those born roughly between 1981 and 1996.
Texters who can type “fast and accurately” using one hand, on the other hand, are probably Gen Z, defined as those born between 1997 and 2012.
Meanwhile, typing accurately with both thumbs is a habit that straddles both millennial and Zoomer generations, per the digital detective.
In fact, Morgan declares that people stay at this “thumb tapping” age until their 50s — the threshold for most Gen Xers, born from 1965 to 1980 — after which they start typing with a thumb and index finger.
Meanwhile, the elder baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — tend to do away with the thumb and just poke the buttons with their pointer digit, per the clip.
“You’re getting up there when you’re doing that,” declared Morgan of the “one finger tap” method.
The tapping expert also gave an honorable mention to people who type with their device held horizontally — a method that’s apparently not characteristic of any particular age group.
“If this is you and you find yourself typing this way, I don’t honestly know how you do it but it’s impressive,” declared the telecommunications decoder.
It’s hard to put a finger on the generational gap in typing techniques, but it could have to do with the progression of texting technology over time.
In 1997, Nokia released the Nokia 9000i Communicator, the first true texting phone with a full keyboard.
Unfortunately, it could be difficult for users who had to press a button several times to input a specific letter — which could account for the one-finger and finger-thumb typing habits popular among older users.
Meanwhile, 1999 marked the debut of the Blackberry, which only required users to push individual letters with their thumbs.
This novel device was all the rage from the early 2000s until the early 2010s — a period of time during which millennials were coming into their digital age.
It’s not just typing techniques that potentially indicate a person’s age — users can reportedly glean one’s generation from the style of their digital correspondence, as well.
For instance, Zoomers claim that using proper punctuation and capital letters while texting is the telltale sign that someone’s older and out of touch.
