The power of SMSs

2006-10-17 12:38

Raleigh, North Carolina - Every day, millions of short messages fly cell-to-cell or between computers and cellphones.

We use them to do our banking, to enter sweepstakes, answer polls, donate to charity. And as recent events have shown us, they can save lives - or do harm.

A 16-year-old used the cellphone she had recently received as a birthday present to send a parting message to her family before a gunman in her Colorado school fatally shot her. "i love u guys," Emily Keyes wrote.

Instant messages, another fingertip medium, help countless parents keep in touch with their kids when they are away. But a disgraced former lawmaker used IMs to flirt with underage congressional pages.

"To virtually every technology there's a good side and a bad side. And in a really short time span here, we've seen the good side and the bad side of text messaging," says Steven Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and author of the book Cybersociety.

Communications revolution

The first text message was sent on December 3, 1992, when British engineer Neil Papworth sent an early "MERRY CHRISTMAS" from his computer to a colleague's cellphone. Papworth's concise, two-word greeting was the harbinger of a communications revolution that has encircled the globe.

The recent text message stories "give you an indication of the power of those devices and how, when used appropriately or inappropriately, they reveal character and true, genuine relationships," says Michael J Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University.

Text started as a message service, a way for companies to efficiently inform customers about things such as problems with the network. But with the proliferation of cellphones and PDAs, texting and IMing have evolved into an indispensable - some would say annoyingly inescapable - form of social interaction.

Abbreviated messages are nothing new. "TTFN", said Tigger in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, meaning "Ta-ta-for now". And many a lover has licked an envelope and scribbled SWAK - "Sealed With a Kiss."

But texters have turned cybershorthand into an art form - g2g ("got to go"), lol ("laughing out loud"), btw ("by the way"), 2g2bt (too good to be true"), bobfoc ("body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch").

With or without abbreviations, text messages can communicate almost anything from the banal to the beautiful, the puerile to the poetic.

Soccer star David Beckham allegedly carried on an affair via texting and was undone when his pecked peccadilloes were revealed to the press.

Critics have savaged the medium for its perceived depredations on grammar, punctuation and spelling. But texting has spawned its own literary forms.

'Interpersonally stupid'

And in wireless-crazed China, author Qian Fuchang became the first text-message novelist in 2004 when he offered Outside the Besieged Fortress, a steamy tale of extramarital love, in 60 chapters of 70 characters each.

But events have illustrated a much more serious side to a medium we have come to take for granted.

The same stealthiness that allows kids to cheat on exams enabled a missing girl in South Carolina to quietly message her mother precise directions on where to send help.

Text messages leave a kind of electronic "paper trail" when the technology is abused.

Former Rep Mark Foley has acknowledged using instant messages, a similar technology, to interact with interns.

Electronic communication, some complain, can create the illusion of distance and anonymity and lull us into a false sense of security.

Cellphone technology has infiltrated our lives so much that we're "interpersonally stupid", says Bugeja, author of the book Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.

"We bought cellphones so that we can be safe, and then we use those cellphones to order pizza driving in a rainstorm," he says. "We're chatting with people we believe are friends who may turn out to be predators."

- AP