If U Cn Rd Ths Msg, U Cn B Txtin W/Millions in Europe & Asia
Students cheat on exams with it. Criminals in England have coordinated a murder with it. A church in Germany has used it to send religion to the masses.
Where there is cheating, plotting and proselytizing, politics can’t be far behind: In Britain’s general election last month, the ruling Labor Party used text messaging to catch the attention of young voters.
Text messaging, a relatively new arrival in the U.S. but well established in Europe and Asia, allows people to send short e-mail-like messages from cell phone to cell phone. It is alternately hailed as technology’s most efficient form of communication--cheaper than a cell phone call and more convenient than computer e-mail--and denigrated as nothing but a teenage fad.
Either way, the medium has penetrated cultural and political life in the parts of the world where the technology is ubiquitous. In Britain, 75% of the population owns a cell phone, compared with about 35% in the United States. About 18% of British cell phone owners use text messaging, compared with less than 1% of Americans who use the service, according to the GSM Assn., a wireless industry group.
But perhaps technology doesn’t change lives so much as give people new ways to do the same old things. Flirting, selling and political organizing are all popular uses of text messaging.
Perhaps the best-known use of the medium came in January, when Filipinos used it to spread word of the political demonstrations that toppled President Joseph Estrada. Last week in London, organizers of a rally against racism and police brutality used text messaging to gather a crowd.
The GSM Assn. says about 16 billion text messages are sent each month around the world. In May, 943 million text messages were sent in Britain alone. Here, the technology is most popular with 16- to 24-year-olds, who have devised a system of shortening words so that their messages fit the 160-character limit of most cell phone screens.
The communication method is so popular, it has spawned not only books on text messaging but the new use of a word: “Text” is now a verb, as in “He’s texting me the address of the party.”
In Britain, the new language of text messaging has been recognized as an art form. The Guardian newspaper sponsored a text-message poetry contest in May. Nearly 7,500 poems were submitted, and the winner, 22-year-old Hetty Hughes, brought home $1,500.
Her poem shows why some people aren’t so happy about the language of text: “txtin iz messin/mi headn’me englis/try2rite essays/they all come out txtis. gran not plsed w/letters/shes getn/swears i wrote better b4 comin2uni. &she;’s african.” (“Texting is messing with my head and my English. Try to write essays and they come out text-ish. Gran is not pleased with the letters she’s getting, swears I wrote better before coming to university. And she’s African.”)
The medium has crept into many aspects of life. British television shows hype their “interactive” qualities, allowing viewers to send text messages to hosts or participants and get updates via text message on shows such as “Survivor” and “Big Brother.”
Inspired by the success of a similar program in Amsterdam, London police are considering sending text messages to stolen cell phones so that anyone who buys the phone from a thief knows it’s hot.
Two schools in London and two in Leicester in central England are participating in a pilot program that sends automatic text messages to parents with announcements of field trips and alerts them if their children are truant.
But not all text messaging is used for positive ends. A court in Birmingham heard testimony that four men who beat another man to death coordinated the attack with phone calls and text messages. A newspaper in Singapore reported that students at British schools around the world send exam questions and answers by text message to classmates in other time zones.
On the other hand, text messaging saved the life of a man hiking in Wales. After falling several hundred feet down a mountain and injuring himself in May, the man called police for help. When they called back, the reception was bad. Because text messages can often get through even when voice contact breaks up, police communicated with him by text message until they rescued him.
As a political tool, the fate of text messaging is unclear. Eager to prod young people to the polls this year, Labor sent 100,000 text messages on Election Day and the days leading up to it.
Because ballots are cast by marking an “X” next to the name of the preferred candidate, the letter X became synonymous with voting. Catchy phrases such as “X LBR IF UR UP4IT” and “VTE LBR 2MORO” were supposed to reach out to young voters who traditionally stay away from the polls.
Despite high-tech gimmicks, turnout in this year’s election was the lowest since World War I--and it was particularly low among young voters. The text message campaign was ineffective, said Margaret Scammell, an expert in political communication at the London School of Economics.
“All kinds of devices were used to try to encourage turnout, and nothing worked terribly well,” she said.
The real message behind this text: More thgs chg, more they R the same.
