Mobile technology is a wonderful thing. It is a scientific marvel. Today you don't call a destination, you call the person directly. Critics say that mobile phones are the single biggest factor that has violated the privacies of hundreds of millions of people around the world. But I am all for it. It is a portable communication device that seconds up as your portable music system, your navigation system, your mailing device, your camera and what not.

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?

Have you noticed that even in IRC/IM chats these days have taken shape of text messages? Even emails are written that way. First IRC chats corrupted the mail writing styles. Then came text-message style of writing and corrupted it even further. Being an Internet user for over a 11 years now through the mobile phone invasion, I have seen the change. Language presentation has changed much more in the last 10-15 years than it changed in the previous 400 years.

@ Wayne : Its interesting that a message may remain the same even with the compression factor of all this - I just feel that with message compression we also tend to have a concomitant increase in the degree of ambiguity of messages. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to ascertain the ”tone” of someone’s meaning with an email, for instance.

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...