Texting is still king

  by futureatlas.com

Despite the wide range of engaging social media available today it never ceases to amaze me that the undisputed king of communication in the net is the humble text message (SMS Short Message service) of 160 characters. It originally emerged as a signalling service in the 2nd generation mobile telephone system GSM in the early 1990s, used at first only for telling you that there was a voicemail message waiting for you. Given its limitations (160 characters, text only, low priority in the network, no guarantee of immediate delivery etc) its rise to fame was largely accidental. The idea of using it to communicate developed because mobile calls were expensive whereas texting was, at least in some countries, much cheaper. The rest is history but it's an excellent case of a service that became successful by accident. No company foresaw its popularity. Later the MMS was developed allowing you to send photos but it never took off in the same way.

Even today, despite the impressive numbers produced by Facebook and Twitter, the SMS is still the choice communication method of young people who weren't even born when the service first took off. An article in The Atlantic, The Most Popular Social Network for Young People? Texting, shows the results of a recent survey of young people's media habits and all social media are in the shadow of texting. Classic voice telephony is now relegated to being an optional extra.

So why does texting still beat Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the others?

• Firstly and most importantly it's not owned by a company and you don't have to sign up for it. No company owns the messages you send and they're not searchable. 
• Texting is available to all regardless of device, model, network etc. No updates, incompatible versions etc.
• Texting works everywhere with mobile coverage.
• In today's incomprehensible telecoms market unblimited texting is usually thrown into every deal and that adds to the attraction.

A further factor is the "good enough" concept. Successful services often have lower quality than competitors but due to their simplicity they are considered good enough. Listening to music as mp3 files is not particularly uplifting in terms of audio quality but the format wins in terms of its versatility and universitality. Texting has no bells or whistles, no fireworks or wow factor - it's simply good enough.

Telephones and e-mail - is the end at hand?

 Some rights reserved by kristiewells

The two most important means of communication for those of us over 30 are showing signs of serious fatigue. Most of us still rely on phone calls and e-mail for the vast majority of our business and personal communication but two new articles in the New York Times indicate that this domination is under threat.

Let's take e-mail first. According to an article by Nick Bilton called Disruptions: Life’s Too Short for So Much E-Mail, 107 trillion e-mails were sent last year from 3.1 billion active accounts. This boils down to the average business user getting an average of 105 e-mails every day. Most of this deluge is unnecessary and could be avoided if people learned a few simple rules like thinking several times before hitting the "reply all" button and not sending so many copies to people who probably don't need to know at all. However the constant flow is hard to regulate since even if you diligently reply quickly to every mail that action simply prompts just as many answers.

"Last year, I decided to try to reach In-box Zero, the Zen-like state of a consistently empty in-box. I spent countless hours one evening replying to neglected messages. I woke up the next morning to find that most of my replies had received replies, and so, once again, my in-box was brimming. It all felt like one big practical joke."

The fact that the vast majority of e-mail in the world is spam does not make the situation easier. Maybe e-mail is simply nearing the end of the line and is suffocating under its own weight. Many under the age of 25 use e-mail very sparingly, preferring to communicate by social media where you have greater control over who can reach you and where communication is usually short and to the point. Most over 25 belong to the e-mail generation and are trapped in it for the time being but we can see new communication models forming.

Good old telephony does seems to be on the retreat already. Again the younger generation clearly prefer texting to phoning and now companies are increasingly abandoning the phone for online communication with customers. Amy O'Leary writes in another NYT article, Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind, about how many net-based companies are simply not on the phone at all.

"Voice calls have been falling out of fashion with teenagers and people in their 20s for some time (text only, please). But what is a matter of preference for the young is becoming a matter of policy for technology companies; phones cost money, phones do not scale."

Global companies like Google or Facebook would need large armies of call-center operators to even try to answer customer questions by telephone and it's easy to understand why they simply don't even try. It simply takes too long to talk to customers and costs too much. Many companies don't even advertise a single phone number and often make their e-mail address very difficult to find. In a global market there simply is no time to deal with the millions of phone enquiries that would stream in. Instead of trying to keep up with the deluge the big companies are switching off and referring customers to self-help sites and forums.

However as the giants become harder to talk to maybe smaller companies can use the old technology to their advantage by providing the exclusive service of voice communication. 

Screen dream

We probably read and write more than ever today but still many people are concerned that we are losing those skills. School kids who in the past would not have willingly written anything outside the classroom now devote hours of their time to writing text messages. Many more hours are spent reading messages and instructions in the games they play as well as communicating constantly with fellow online gamers. Never before have so many people been involved in written communication through blogs, wikis and discussion groups. Yet still many people are worried that something is missing. We don't read books and newspapers so much any more, we read screens.

  by  Geoff LMV 

This is the subject of an article by Kevin Kelly in The Smithsonian, Reading in a whole new way. We are surrounded by screens through which we gather and spread information, communicate, collaborate, socialize, inform, reflect and entertain. Screens are a much more dynamic arena than a static page; texts pop up, banners flash, links lead you straight to new information plus all the multimedia content. They also demand new reading and writing strategies.

"Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time."

I certainly read differently on a screen. I skim through texts looking for the main points and am very easily distracted by an interesting looking link or a film clip. I seldom read carefully anything of more than 3-4 pages on a screen. As a result we are learning to write differently for the screen. Long, formal and complex texts simply don't work on the web. No one will have the patience to read them. The question is where we should have such material or if it should exist at all. Not everything can be written in screen-friendly format.

The article contrasts screen reading from book reading but when all books are also on the screen the concept of reading will radically shift. The e-book has many functions that the printed version lacks: note-taking, referencing, links, video material, in-built dictionary etc. Will this change the way we read a novel? Will future novels have hyperlinks and interactive applications? Will people even write novels - why not multimedia games instead? Will the concept of the book change completely once it has moved into the digital realm?

Txting gets serious

  by  ejbSF 

How many teenagers you know use e-mail regularly (if at all)? Or for that matter how many use their cellphones to talk? Not many I suspect. The communication defaults of many years are under threat and the winner of the communication battle seems to be good old texting. Curious, since texting/SMS virtually predates e-mail and is a supremely primitive service that was included in the old GSM mobile system in the early nineties. SMS became a success completely by accident since its main purpose from the beginning was to enable cellular operators to inform you that you had a voice message waiting for you. The operators were completely taken by surprise when youngsters started using the text service to communicate to avoid paying the high call charges. A fine example of an accidental technology that gets used for something completely different from what the inventors intended. The rest is history.

The lack of interest in e-mail and voice calling presents a problem to many colleges and universities. How do we communicate with our students? Standard student e-mail accounts are often unread and the only way to really get through is by texting. Texts are hard to avoid whereas it's easy not to log into your student e-mail account for a week or so. Texting is ubiquitous in that everyone has a mobile, therefore everyone is contactable. All other channels have an opt-in factor and often have competing and mutually exclusive solutions.

Texting has definitely come of age in the academic world; so much so that there's a whole conference dedicated to it. The University of Bath is host today to the Let's talk about txt 6 conference with sessions on how texting is being used in higher education for marketing, student communication and learning. The fact that this is the sixth such conference shows that all this is well-established even if it has taken me until now to discover it! I certainly am not aware of a similar volume of interest here in Scandinavia. Read more about the conference in an article on Merlinjohnonline, Leading texters head for Let's Talk About Txt 6.

I will certainly follow the conference proceedings with interest. The telecom boffin who decided to dedicate the 140 byte signalling channel in GSM to text communication should be pretty proud today.

The texting myth

One of the most prolific urban myths in recent years is that teenagers' cellphone texting is seriously damaging their writing skills. Tales of students handing in school assignments full of text abbreviations are passed around the net but is there any truth behind them?

It's refreshing to get the answer from one of the most respected authorities in language and communication, David Crystal in his new book; the aptly named Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. There's an interview with him in Visual Thesaurus, David Crystal on the myth of texting where he states that the texted assignment was really a hoax put out on the net to stir up feelings and then became a truth that people were only too willing to believe. Internet myths are much stronger than myths of the past since they can become global "truths" in a matter of hours.

Abbreviations are used in SMS-texting and, indeed, in the more adult arena of Twitter due to space restrictions. We're forced to cut out all embellishments and focus on the bare bones. Teenagers, argues Crystal, are able to cope easily with different registers of language and realize clearly when texting language is appropriate. Interviews with many teenagers reveal that they can't believe how anyone would use texting abbreviations in school work. It simply doesn't belong there and they all realise that. In addition, by analysing large amounts of text messages Crystal found that only around 10% of words were abbreviated at all, thereby deflating the whole debate.

There's nothing new with abbreviated forms of course. I certainly used them in my note-taking at lectures at university and they certainly didn't get reproduced in my essays. Property terms like des res, all mod cons (desirable residence, all modern conveniences) have been with us for many tears without any fears for estate agents' literacy skills. Somehow the use of devices that many adults still feel uncomfortable with makes old habits suddenly seem threatening.