Southerners lead nation in mobile use y’all

According to a recent post on the NielsenWire blog, southern mobile customers, along with blacks, teens and women talk and text the most among mobile customers in the U.S.

Average text messages per month by state

Southern states lead way in text message use.

There’s a lot of overlap between blacks, teens, Southerners, and women, of course. After all, the South, save Florida, is generally younger with a higher percentage of black people than the United States as a whole. The South’s unique demographics are likely what’s driving the numbers of the regional trend.

But is this a case of age, race, and gender or the intersections of age, race, and gender with income and the resulting life context? Consider a multi-person household. Would you prefer personal service phone with access that you control, or phone service that makes it easy for siblings or parents to eavesdrop from another handset? What if you can only afford to spend $50 per month on phone service? Portable $50 per month phone service is way more attractive than the $50 service that requires you to stay home. If you’re a talker (and women do talk more than men), the unlimited long distance available on your mobile phone is way better than the metered long distance you may get from your land-line carrier.