IM not afraid

What could be the single most important aid to helping teenagers tackle difficult communications - such as asking someone out on a date? If you guessed "a mobile phone" you're half-way there. It's "texting" which according to a report reported in Wired, gives "a significant number of young people the courage to say or do things they wouldn't necessarily say or do face to face". This raises a number of questions ... like is it mobile phone companies that are behind such studies; and if people do this, is it possible that the very face of communication will change? Will we one day be talking about non-verbal behaviour as a popular but largely baseless paradigm that was phased out in the early 21st Century?