Text Messaging
WaPo runs a piece this morning about the popularity of text messaging. Excerpts:
A text message sent via mobile phone is usually confined to 160 characters or less and takes several seconds to send. To accommodate this short form, language is acquiring acronyms -- "H8" (hate), "iluvu" (I love you) and "ruok" (are you okay) -- that allow text messages and other instant messages to relay information about life's mundane details as well as its emotional brambles.
About 7.3 billion text messages are sent within the United States every month, up from 2.9 billion a month a year ago, according to CTIA, the wireless industry's trade group. . . .
The relative inconvenience of typing out words using a numeric keypad -- the letter "c," for example, requires three presses of the "2" button -- and the brevity of the message may seem a hostile environment for heartfelt discussion. But the discipline of having to distill thoughts into short bulletins, then waiting to receive the response, allows users to pour more meaning into the writing, some text-message users say. . . .
Text messages also feel more personal because the cell phone is always physically close, Lung said -- a feature that works for and against him. He recently got into an argument with a friend, for example, who sent angry messages in all capital letters, berating him for ignoring her. "She started insulting me over text message . . . and it was not a good scene. It annoyed the hell out of me," he said. "Text messaging will catch you no matter where you are."
It's that last part that gets me. I see the same thing with cell phone users: a desire to be accessible to --and contacted by--others, non-stop.
Why would a person want to be accessible wherever he goes? Openness to others is a good thing--indeed, it's the key thing, it's the thing on which love is based--but a person should also be able to be alone, to sit back with a beer and think without distraction, to read without distraction, to contemplate without distraction, to pray without distraction.
Heck, I'd even argue that the non-stop otherness hinders true otherness. To take an extreme example, if you take a text message during an intimate moment with your wife, you'll probably find the "otherness" abruptly severed. Or, to take a less dramatic example, if you take a text message (or a cell phone call) during a conversation with a friend, you're severing the otherness with your friend. You're severing connectedness with a flesh-and-blood person in front of you who is likely to there for awhile, in order to connect with a person far away who will likely be off the line in a few minutes.
I might also argue that the continual state of distraction that is the cell phone creates a state of existence that is not amenable to true otherness. The constant cell phone use strikes me as a type of vanity that constantly wants the self satisfied--by taking this call, by sending this text message. Such vanity (because it's so self-absorbed) is unable to connect with others at any level other than the superficial (which is consistent with the superficial connectedness of 160-character text messages). But that argument will have to wait another day.
