I don’t text message much. As my kids (age 10 and 14) have become more socially active, and as I find myself volunteering and mentoring for their activities and coordinating with the parents of their peers, I find myself texting more. But it’s not my preferred medium.

In countries around the world, text-message traffic has been shrinking because Internet-powered alternatives are becoming so widely used. American carriers have fought off the decline — until now.

For the first time, the American wireless market saw a decline in the total number of messages sent by each customer each month, according to a report published Monday by Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst who is a consultant for wireless carriers. In the third quarter of this year, cellphone owners sent an average of 678 texts a month, down from 696 texts a month in the previous quarter. —NYTimes.com.