Text messaging

(Original draft was from November 2006, the Friday after Thanksgiving. This is one of the posts I drafted but never published. Decided to wrap it up and publish it now, 2/7/07.)

First of all let me wish all you excellent readers a happy turkey day. Hope it was good for you. I can't resist my sister's cooking, she is the best chef. Somehow I managed to put away two pieces of apple pie a la mode. You can always find room for good home cookin'.

In the interests of not wasting this work-holiday-Friday, I thought I'd make a deposit to the ol' blog which has been unfortunately neglected for the last month or so. Of course, that coincides with my first month of work, so it's understandable. Here we go.

The subject: text messaging. All the rage nowadays. And when I first started to meet people here who used text messages, I was quite impressed. Such an unobtrusive mode of conversation. Somebody texts me while I'm out to dinner, on the subway, at work -- no problem! Pardon me dinner guest, pardon me work, pardon me whatever, click click click, and there's communication. Or, suppose I have a crush on somebody but I'm too shy to call. Maybe they're busy, maybe they don't want to talk to me. It's easy to hide behind a text message! What's the worst they'll do, ignore it? And then I have an excuse - maybe they didn't get it, maybe they were busy. Same goes for friends even. An excuse to be polite and not bother a friend if that friend doesn't happen to want to speak to me just at this moment! Winner winner winner! I didn't even make it through that paragraph without getting all sarcastic and bitter. While there was an initial spark to text messaging, I'm done with it. I understand the draw: text messages are actually supposed to facilitate conversation. The real deal: they stifle conversation.

How, gentle readers, do they stifle conversation? Let's start with some logistical problems. Well, first of all, I don't know about you, but I'm limited to 160 characters in many cases. Being the excellent and verbose guy that I am, 160 characters is a tough limit, and indeed, I think it drives a lot of people to brevity. It's always a bummer when I put together a thoughtful message of exactly 158 characters and end up with a response of "ok", "yea", or "haha". There's also a problem similar to email -- it's very difficult to ascertain a respondent's tone from just text. And, also, user error (though not unique to text messaging): if I read the message incorrectly and misinterpret it. Not exactly instant feedback to figure that out. If I even do realize I've misinterpreted the message, I've probably responded in a manner I didn't intend and want my response back. Too late if I've already sent it!

But I'm much more interested in issues beyond logistics. Let's talk about being polite. It seems to have become acceptable (and, actually, your humble writer has been guilty of this a few times even) to check your vibrating or ringing cell phone while out to dinner with friends, out on a date, or the like, and write back a text message. While I have done this while out to dinner with friends, or even just checked it anticipating or hoping for a message, I still feel a pang of guilt. I was on the receiving end of this on a date a while back, and this is where I formed my hard line stance. In such situations I turn my cell phone off. Not vibrate, not alarm, OFF. My thought was that if I am out on a date, I am out with my date, not my friends, not anyone who might call me or send me a text message. Same goes with dinner with friends. On my own, sure, I can sit by the phone if I want, trying to will a text message. Come on, you know you do it too.

There's also the fact that it just breaks up the conversation. Just yesterday, in fact, I was texting someone back and forth .... and I'm sad when I'm in the middle of text messaging with someone and all of a sudden it stops. Sure, they may have become busy, received a phone call, etc. But in a real phone conversation, if one party gets busy, they say to the other, "yeah, I'm busy, I'll call you later!" and the conversation ends. There's not this mystery about why it's been a half hour between text messages. (Especially when I come up with some particularly clever response -- and I get nothing back. Boo!)

So there you have it. I still text message on the subway and sometimes to be cute, but generally try to shy away. You want to talk to me? Please give me a buzz. My sexy voice will no doubt repay you for your efforts to dial me up.