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The most salient symptom of the age of electronic communication in popular culture and communications is the incessant compression of the message. From instant messaging, emails, SMS text messages, memetic replication and quite probably in day-to-day conversation - we are all now expected to say more with less.
Abbreviation is the most pronounced example of text compression and a whole new symbolic language has been borne on the twitching of so many thumbs. The tendency to greater and greater compression within communication is a process which acts, Janus-like, in two directions. By limiting the actual visual and communicated content it saves time and (both physical and electrical) energy but only at a price. The more we compress things, the more we depend on a wider and denser complexity of networked references and connections in a wider cultural and technological matrix to both make and interpret these messages. The more we shrink the content of our messages, the larger they become - even if only through their participation in a vaster system of reference, meaning and symbol-making. This is perhaps analogous to the ways in which we (as individuals progressively becoming more and more isolated from one another through our reliance on these technologies) are also fundamentally defined by an external world which beguiles us into believing we have an isolated and separate self. We never seem to notice how much our existential self-definitions rely on the external world and indeed we have built an entire civilisation on this misrepresentation of reality.
More people are making more messages more often but are they all really saying much less ? Is this the beginning of the end of nuance and the death of the poetry of the written word ? The moving finger writes, and having writ - goes off in search of a phone charger...
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The usefulness of the technology is it’s raison d’etre. Even if I have not charged my phone with credit, it is handy to have around in case of emergencies and the boon to instant interpersonal communications (as with your mother and yourself) is a major attraction of all of this.
I don’t know if the invention of the internet and the consequent text messaging technologies are as significant as the invention of the Gutenberg press (as some writers have suggested) but we are most certainly witnessing something of a ”phase transition” in the complexity of and roles the technology plays in our lives.
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@ Prasad : Language is always evolving. The written word is simply a symbolic means for conveying a message and although I have reservations about the increase of ambiguity with the digital text messaging world and the compression of the message content (if not the meaning intent), I also marvel at the rapid speed of change. We are trying to say more with less and I wonder where it will all end. The more things become complex, the less we try to use to convey meanings between one another.
Aldous Huxley once said something along the lines that the closest a writer to could ever get to expressing the Divine (i.e. the infinite) was a blank sheet of paper. Perhaps a pure and perfect silence is the inevitable end-point of all this compression, where we are so saturated with meanings and symbolic messages that there is no longer any need to communicate. Or perhaps the era of brain-to-brain quantum non-local telephony is just around the corner...
Of all these things, this wonderful technology has in a way sent us back to the period when fast communication started - the invention of the telegraphy. Text messaging system took us right back there. It now reminds me of sending short abbreviated messages to save some pennies sending a telegram back home intimating my anxious mom that I reached my cousin's safely in New Zealand. The technology made the sending device smaller and portable, but in essence it has remained the same. What do you say?