Youth and Media Response # 7 – In the Context of Texting

When I was in elementary school, my sister was in high school. The phone used to ring for her, day and night. She’d get calls from her closest girl friends and even the occasional boy. I remember how she would get upset and yell from her room when I would spy on her conversations from other house phones. Even my mother would do the same! It was part of a game. I would listen in just because it was in my bratty nature as her little brother. My mother would listen in because she insisted on understanding the ins and outs of her little girl’s adolescence. My sister knew this and so she would always ensure that her phone was not tapped before getting into the juicy gossip. She could never really talk with boys without thinking that somebody could be listening. And boys could never call without being embarrassed by mother picking up before her. Today, with the mobile phone, this game of sneaking and spying has changed.

With the mobile phone, you no longer need to worry that someone else is listening in on your immediate conversations (except maybe the government!). If you want to take it even another step further, you can text—thereby preventing nearby people from hearing you. The interesting thing about texting is that it provides its own unique context of communication, separate from the home phone and even mobile voice conversations. Take, for example, texting for the use of romance. As Rich Ling points out in “Children, Youth and Mobile Communication,” after interest is conveyed between two individuals, “texting can be used to ease the initial stages of the romance since it allows for more carefully staged and properly edited interaction.” The communication timeframe changes in the context of texting. Immediate response is not necessary and not expected. Information can be absorbed, digested, and fed back much slower than any voice or face-to-face conversation. It is also much less formal than a letter or email. Given these reasons, even the least witty individual can flirt with little difficulty. The problem with this is that people may become so attuned to the context of texting (or chatting online… for the sake of this argument) that interaction in reality may be awkward. There is a Cingular commercial that plays on this dynamic on the text savvy adolescent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o

It’s strange to me that, given the time and space restraint, texting is still used as a primary method of communication. With the use of acronyms and small words, we are limited to the amount of information we can communicate. Even Morse code can communicate information faster than texting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t041g4X-aM0

It seems we are regressing.

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On another note… The Onion has released another funny video in the wake of the Obama election victory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3_95F5e-Ac