A Brief History of Texting
Texting is changing how we write
the medium changes the message
I will admit, when texting first came along, I was skeptical. No, I was more than skeptical, I was downright dismissive. I couldn’t understand why, if you already had a phone in your hand, you wouldn’t just call someone and actually talk to them, instead of sending a short, impersonal message. After all, we already had email for writing messages to people. Shows how much I know.
When texting was introduced in 1992, it didn’t take off right away. It wasn’t until the advent of full keyboards on mobile phones, first introduced by Nokia in 1997, that texting started to be the next revolution in written communication. Then Apple introduced the iPhone in January 2007, and by the end of 2007 text messaging was the most widely used mobile data service, with 74% of all mobile phone users worldwide, or 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion phone subscribers.
In my defense, in the early days of texting, we didn’t have colorful emojis to convey meaning. The shortness of texts felt cold and impersonal. People were just beginning to get around that problem by using punctuation symbols, such as :) for happy or ;) for a knowing wink. But still, texting just seemed like another milepost on the downward slide of Western civilization. Where was the craft?! The well-thought-out sentence structure? The beautiful prose? Even more important, it just seemed so impersonal.
I remember one of my first exposures to texting. It was November 2008, and I was sailing my boat from Eastern Long Island to the Bahamas, where we were going to spend the winter. A few old friends had offered to help sail the boat on the first leg from Long Island to Norfolk, Virginia, about a three day sail. It was a guy trip, with lots of joking and fun, but it was a serious endeavor; sailing in the North Atlantic in November is never a piece of cake. We left Eastern Long Island in very rough conditions and arrived in Norfolk in the middle of a snow storm. We were out of sight of land most of the time, with no cell service. When we finally sailed into the mouth of the Chesapeake, our phones lit up with little bars. Service!
My friend David pulled out his phone and texted his wife that we had made it safe and sound, and he would be catching a train back to New York City later that day. I thought that was one of the dumbest things I had ever seen. Why didn’t he just call her? Wouldn’t she be worried about him after being at sea for three days in such cold, rough conditions? Wouldn’t she want to hear his voice? They had young kids, wouldn’t she want to put them on the line?
But I now know the pragmatic reasons why his texting made sense. For one thing, he could give her the time his train came in, and what time he’d be home, and she didn’t have to write it down. Secondly, she was a busy mom, and who knows what she was doing at that very moment. She didn’t’t have to drop everything to talk to him. And maybe he was just so exhausted at that moment that he didn’t want to talk, but he could still do the responsible thing and check in and let her know he had made it in one piece. No reason to cash in the life insurance policy.
In the eleven years since that trip, texting has become so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine modern life without it. Email has become mostly junk email, or the way to send longer business messages with attachments while texting has become the preferred written method to communicate with family and close friends. There are specific ways to write texts that are different from writing for other media. For more specifics on how to write texts, check out the blog posts Texting Means Correcting and Texting, Puncuation & Sex.
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