Text messaging
Encyclopedia
Text messaging, or texting, refers to the exchange of brief written text messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network. While the original term (see below) was derived from referring to messages sent using the Short Message Service (SMS
) originated from Radio Telegraphy, it has since been extended to include messages containing image, video, and sound content (known as MMS
messages). The sender of a text message is known as a texter, while the service itself has different colloquialism
s depending on the region: it may simply be referred to as a text in North America, India
, Australia
, the Philippines
and the United Kingdom, an SMS in most of Europe, and a TMS or SMS in the Middle East and Asia.
Text messages can be used to interact with automated systems such as ordering products and services for mobile phones or participating in contests. Advertisers and service providers use direct text marketing
to notify mobile phone users about promotions, payment due dates and other notifications that can usually be sent by post, e-mail or voicemail
.
In a straight and concise definition for the purposes of this English Language article, text messaging by phones or mobile phones should include all 26 letters of the alphabet and 10 numerals, i.e., alpha-numeric messages, or text, to be sent by texter or received by the textee.
messaging was first used in December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group
(now Airwide Solutions
), used a personal computer
to send the text message "Merry Christmas" via the Vodafone
network to the phone of Richard Jarvis.
Standard SMS
messaging uses 140 byte
s per message, which translates to 160 characters of the English alphabet using 7-bit
encoding or as few as 70 characters for languages using non-Latin alphabets using UTF-16 encoding. (The commonly cited limit of 140 characters is imposed by some services like Twitter
that reserve 20 characters for non-message content, like addressing.)
Initial growth of text messaging was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 message per GSM customer per month. One factor in the slow take-up of SMS was that operators were slow to set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and eliminate billing fraud, which was possible by changing SMSC
settings on individual handsets to use the SMSCs of other operators. Over time, this issue was eliminated by switch-billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it.
SMS is available on a wide range of networks, including 3G
networks. However, not all text messaging systems use SMS, and some notable alternate implementations of the concept include J-Phone's SkyMail and NTT Docomo
's Short Mail, both in Japan. E-mail messaging from phones, as popularized by NTT Docomo's i-mode
and the RIM BlackBerry
, also typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP
over TCP/IP
.
Today, text messaging is 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, at end of 2007 being active users of the Short Message Service. In countries such as Finland, Sweden and Norway, over 85% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 80%, and North America is rapidly catching up with over 60% active users of SMS by end of 2008. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers is in the Philippines, with an average of 27 texts sent per day by subscriber.
Some text messages such as SMS
can also be used for the remote controlling of appliances. It is widely used in domotics systems. Some amateurs have also built own systems to control (some of) their appliances via SMS.
A Flash SMS is a type of text message that appears directly on the main screen without user interaction and is not automatically stored in the inbox. I can be usefull in cases such as an emergency
(e.g. fire alarm
) or confidentiality
(e.g. one-time password
).
Short message services are developing very rapidly throughout the world.
SMS is particularly popular in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan; see below), United States, Australia and New Zealand and is also gaining influence in Africa. Popularity has grown to a sufficient extent that the term texting (used as a verb
meaning the act of mobile phone users sending short messages back and forth) has entered the common lexicon. Young Asians consider SMS as the most popular mobile phone application.
In China, SMS is very popular and has brought service providers significant profit (18 billion short messages were sent in 2001). It is a very influential and powerful tool in the Philippines
, where the average user sends 10–12 text messages a day. The Philippines
alone sends on the average 400 million text messages a day, or approximately 142 billion text messages sent a year, more than the annual average SMS volume of the countries in Europe, and even China and India. SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores updates, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS.
Texting became popular in the Philippines in 1998. In 2001, text messaging played an important role in deposing former Philippine president Joseph Estrada
. Similarly, in 2008, text messaging played a primary role in the implication of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick
in an SMS sex scandal.
Short messages are particularly popular among young urbanites. In many markets, the service is comparatively cheap. For example, in Australia, a message typically costs between A$
0.20 and $0.25 to send (some prepaid services charge $0.01 between their own phones), compared with a voice call, which costs somewhere between $0.40 and $2.00 per minute (commonly charged in half-minute blocks). Despite the low cost to the consumer, the service is enormously profitable to the service providers. At a typical length of only 190 bytes (including protocol overhead), more than 350 of these messages per minute can be transmitted at the same data rate as a usual voice call (9 kbit/s). There are also free SMS services available, which are often sponsored and allow sending SMS from a PC connected to the internet.
Mobile service providers in New Zealand, such as Vodafone
and Telecom NZ, provide up to 2000 SMS messages for NZ$10 per month. Users on these plans send on average 1500 SMS messages every month.
Text messaging has become so popular that advertising agencies and advertisers are now jumping into the text messaging business. Services that provide bulk text message sending are also becoming a popular way for clubs, associations, and advertisers to reach a group of opt-in subscribers quickly.
and/or offering the text messaging capability as an operator of their own SMSC
with SS7.
SMS messaging gateway providers can provide gateway-to-mobile (Mobile Terminated–MT) services. Some suppliers can also supply mobile-to-gateway (text-in or Mobile Originated/MO services). Many operate text-in services on shortcodes or mobile number ranges, whereas others use lower-cost geographic text-in numbers.
and the value added service provider
(VASP), either through revenue share or a fixed transport fee. Services like 82ASK and Any Question Answered have used the PSMS model to enable rapid response to mobile consumers' questions, using on-call teams of experts and researchers.
Premium short messages are increasingly being used for "real-world" services. For example, some vending machines now allow payment by sending a premium-rated short message, so that the cost of the item bought is added to the user's phone bill or subtracted from the user's prepaid credits. Recently, premium messaging companies have come under fire from consumer groups due to a large number of consumers racking up huge phone bills.
A new type of free-premium or hybrid-premium content has emerged with the launch of text-service websites. These sites allow registered users to receive free text messages when items they are interested in go on sale, or when new items are introduced.
An alternative to inbound SMS is based on long numbers (international mobile number format, e.g., +44 7624 805000, or geographic numbers that can handle voice and SMS, e.g., 01133203040), which can be used in place of short codes or premium-rated short messages for SMS reception in several applications, such as TV voting, product promotions, and campaigns. Long numbers are internationally available, as well as enabling businesses to have their own number, rather than short codes, which are usually shared across a lot of brands. Additionally, Long numbers are non-premium inbound numbers.
, and mobile communications. Some practical uses of text messaging include the fuse of SMS for confirming delivery or other tasks, for instant communication between a service provider and a client (e.g., stock broker and investor), and for sending alerts. Several universities have implemented a system of texting students and faculties campus alerts. One such example is Penn State
.
As text messaging has proliferated in business, so too have regulations governing its use. One regulation specifically governing the use of text messaging in financial-services firms engaged in stocks, equities, and securities trading is Regulatory Notice 07-59, Supervision of Electronic Communications, December 2007, issued to member firms by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
. In 07-59, FINRA noted that "electronic communications", "e-mail", and "electronic correspondence" may be used interchangeably and can include such forms of electronic messaging as instant messaging and text messaging. Industry has had to develop new technology to allow companies to archive their employees' text messages.
Security, confidentiality, reliability and speed of SMS are among the most important guarantees industries such as financial services, energy and commodities trading, health care and enterprises demand in their mission-critical procedures. One way to guarantee such a quality of text messaging lies in introducing SLAs (Service Level Agreement
), which are common in IT contracts. By providing measurable SLAs, corporations can define reliability parameters and set up a high quality of their services. Just one of many SMS applications that has proven highly popular and successful in the financial-services industry is mobile receipts. In January 2009, Mobile Marketing Association
(MMA) published the Mobile Banking Overview for financial institutions in which it discussed the advantages and disadvantages of mobile channel platforms such as Short Message Services (SMS
), Mobile Web, Mobile Client Applications, SMS with Mobile Web and Secure SMS.
Mobile interaction services are an alternative way of using SMS in business communications with greater certainty.
Typical business-to-business applications are telematics
and Machine-to-Machine, in which two applications automatically communicate with each other. Incident alerts are also common, and staff communications are also another use for B2B scenarios.
Businesses can use SMS for time-critical alerts, updates and reminders, mobile campaigns, content and entertainment applications.
Mobile interaction can also be used for consumer-to-business interactions, such as media voting and competitions, and for consumer-to-consumer interaction, for example, with mobile social networking, chatting and dating.
In the Republic of Ireland
, a total of 1.5 billion messages are sent every quarter, on average 114 messages per person per month. In the United Kingdom over 1 billion text messages are sent every week.
The Eurovision Song Contest
organized the first pan-European SMS voting in 2002, as a part of the voting system (there was also a voting over traditional phone lines). In 2005, the Eurovision Song Contest organized the biggest televoting ever (with SMS and phone voting).
During roaming
, that is, when a user connects to another network in different country from his own, the prices may be higher, but in July 2009, EU
legislation went into effect limiting this price to €0.11.
In the U.S., SMS is often charged both at the sender and at the destination, but, unlike phone calls, it cannot be rejected or dismissed. The reasons for lower uptake than other countries are varied—many users have unlimited "mobile-to-mobile" minutes, high monthly minute allotments, or unlimited service. Moreover, push to talk
services offer the instant connectivity of SMS and are typically unlimited. Furthermore, the integration between competing providers and technologies necessary for cross-network text messaging has only been available recently. Some providers originally charged extra to enable use of text, further reducing its usefulness and appeal. In the third quarter of 2006, at least 12 billion text messages crossed AT&T's network, up almost 15 percent from the preceding quarter.
In the United States, while texting is widely popular among the ages of 13–22 years old, it is increasing among adults and business users as well. The age that a child receives his/her first cell phone has also decreased, making text messaging a very popular way of communication for all ages. Texting has become so involved in the American
lifestyle that text poet Norman Silver published his "10 Txt Commandments". The number of texts being sent in the United States has gone up over the years as the price has gone down to an average of $0.10 per text sent and received.
In order to convince more customers to include text messaging plans, some major cellphone providers have recently increased the price to send and receive text messages from $.15 to $.20 per message. This is over $1,300 per megabyte
. Many providers offer unlimited plans, in which texting is mostly free.
apiece, and games can require the player to send dozens of messages. In December 2003, a Finnish TV channel, MTV3
, put a Santa Claus
character on air reading aloud messages sent in by viewers. On March 12, 2004, the first entirely "interactive" TV channel, VIISI, began operation in Finland. That did not last long, as SBS Finland Oy took over the channel and turned it into a music channel named The Voice in November 2004.
In 2006, the Prime Minister of Finland
, Matti Vanhanen
, made front-page news when he allegedly broke up with his girlfriend with a text message.
In 2007, the first book written solely in text messages, Viimeiset viestit (Last Messages), was released by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala
. It is about a business executive who travels throughout Europe and India.
Mobile-service providers in Finland offer contracts in which one can send 1000 text messages a month for the price of €10.
's Short Mail. Japanese adolescents first began text messaging, because it was a cheaper form of communication than the other available forms. Thus, Japanese theorists created the selective interpersonal relationship theory, claiming that mobile phones can change social networks among young people (classified as 13- to 30-year-olds). They theorized this age group had extensive but low-quality relationships with friends, and mobile-phone usage may facilitate improvement in the quality of their relationships. They concluded this age group prefers "selective interpersonal relationships in which they maintain particular, partial, but rich relations, depending on the situation." The same studies showed participants rated friendships in which they communicated face-to-face and through text messaging as being more intimate than those in which they communicated solely face-to-face. This indicates participants make new relationships with face-to-face communication at an early stage, but use text messaging to increase their contact later on. It is also interesting to note that as the relationships between participants grew more intimate, the frequency of text messaging also increased.
However, short messaging has been largely rendered obsolete by the prevalence of mobile Internet e-mail
, which can be sent to and received from any e-mail address, mobile or otherwise. That said, while usually presented to the user simply as a uniform "mail" service (and most users are unaware of the distinction), the operators may still internally transmit the content as short messages, especially if the destination is on the same network.
Text message spam is also a problem in China. In 2007, 353.8 billion spam messages were sent, up 93% from the previous year. It is about 12.44 messages per week per person.
It is routine that the People's Republic of China
government monitor text messages across the country for illegal content.
Among Chinese migrant workers with little formal education, it is common to refer to SMS manuals when text messaging. These manuals are published as cheap, handy, smaller-than-pocket-size booklets that offer diverse linguistic phrases to use as messages.
Because of the highly social nature of Philippine culture and the affordability of SMS compared to voice calls, SMS usage shot up, and texting quickly became a popular tool for Filipinos to keep in touch with their friends and loved ones. Filipinos used texting not only for social but also for political purposes, as it allowed the Filipinos to express their opinions on current events and political issues. As a result, it became a powerful tool for Filipinos in promoting or denouncing certain issues and was a key factor during the 2001 EDSA II revolution, which overthrew then-President Joseph Estrada
, who was eventually found guilty of plunder.
According to 2009 stats, there are about 72 million mobile-service subscriptions (roughly 80% of the Filipino population), with around 1.39 billion SMS messages being sent in the Philippines daily. Because of the large amount of text messages being sent by Filipinos, the Philippines became known as the "text capital of the world" during the late 1990s until the early 2000s.
acquired Bellsouth New Zealand in 1998 and claims to hold 53.7% of New Zealand's mobile market as of 30 December 2007, and 2degrees
arrived in 2009. As of 2005, around 85% of the adult population had a mobile phone. In general, texting is more popular than phone calls, as it is viewed as less intrusive and therefore more polite.
, allowing viewers to vote in online and TV polls, as well as receive information on the move. Texting can also bring people together and create a sense of community through "Smart Mobs" or "Net War", which create "people power".
has caused a number of adaptations of spelling: as in the phrase "txt msg", "lol", "brb", "HMU", or use of CamelCase
, such as in "ThisIsVeryLame". To avoid the even more limited message lengths allowed when using Cyrillic
or Greek
letters, speakers of languages written in those alphabets often use the Latin alphabet
for their own language
.
In certain languages utilizing diacritic
marks, such as Polish
, SMS technology created an entire new variant of written language: characters normally written with diacritic marks (e.g., ą
, ę
, ś
, ż
in Polish) are now being written without them (as a, e, s, z) to enable using cell phones without Polish script
or to save space in Unicode
messages.
Historically, this language developed out of shorthand used in bulletin board system
s and later in Internet chat room
s, where users would abbreviate some words to allow a response to be typed more quickly, though the amount of time saved was often inconsequential. However, this became much more pronounced in SMS, where mobile phone users do not generally have access to a QWERTY
keyboard as computer users did, more effort is required to type each character, and there is a limit on the number of characters that may be sent.
In Mandarin Chinese, numbers that sound similar to words are used in place of those words. For example, the numbers 520 in Chinese (wu er ling) sound like the words for "I love you" (wo ai ni). The sequence 748 (qi si ba) sounds like the curse "go to hell" (qu si ba).
Predictive text
software, which attempts to guess words (Tegic
's T9
as well as iTAP) or letters
(Eatoni's LetterWise
), reduces the labour of time-consuming input. This makes abbreviations not only less necessary, but slower to type than regular words that are in the software's dictionary
; however, it does make the messages longer, often requiring the text message to be sent in multiple parts and, therefore, costing more to send.
The use of text messaging has changed the way that people talk and write essays, some believing it to be harmful. In November 2006, New Zealand Qualifications Authority approved the move that allowed students of secondary schools to use mobile phone text language in the end-of-the-year-exam papers. Highly publicized reports, beginning in 2002, of the use of text language in school assignments caused some to become concerned that the quality of written communication is on the decline, and other reports claim that teachers and professors are beginning to have a hard time controlling the problem. However, the notion that text language is widespread or harmful is refuted by research from linguistic experts.
An article in The New Yorker
explores how text messaging has anglicized
some of the world's languages. The use of diacritic
marks is dropped in languages such as French
, as well as symbols in Ethiopian languages
. In his book, Txtng: the Gr8 Db8
, David Crystal
says that texters in all eleven languages use "lol", "u", "brb", and "gr8", all English-based shorthands. The use of pictograms and logograms in texts are present in every language. They shorten words by using symbols to represent the word or symbols whose name sounds like a syllable of the word such as in 2day or b4. This is commonly used in other languages as well. Crystal gives some examples in several languages such as Italian sei, "six", is used for sei, "you are". Example: dv 6 = dove sei ("where are you") and French sept "seven" = cassette ("casette"). There is also the use of numeral sequences, substituting for several syllables of a word and creating whole phrases using numerals. For example, in French, a12c4 can be said as à un de ces quatres, "see you around" (literally: "to one of these four [days]"). An example of using symbols in texting and borrowing from English is the use of @. Whenever it is used in texting, its intended use is with the English pronunciation. Crystal gives the example of the Welsh use of @ in @F, pronounced ataf, meaning "to me". In character-based languages such as Chinese and Japanese, numbers are assigned syllables based on the shortened form of the pronunciation of the number, sometimes the English pronunciation of the number. In this way, numbers alone can be used to communicate whole passages, such as in Chinese, "8807701314520" can be literally translated as "Hug hug you, kiss kiss you, whole life, whole life I love you." English influences worldwide texting in variation but still in combination with the individual properties of languages.
American popular culture
is also recognized in shorthand. For example, Homer Simpson
translates into: ~(_8^(|). Crystal also suggests that texting has led to more creativity in the English language, giving people opportunities to create their own slang, emoticons, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. The feeling of individualism and freedom excites people, making texting increasingly more popular and a more efficient way to communicate.
Recent research by Rosen et al. (2009) found that those young adults who used more language-based textisms (shortcuts such as LOL, 2nite, etc.) in daily writing produced worse formal writing than those young adults who used fewer linguistic textisms in daily writing. However, the exact opposite was true for informal writing. This suggests that perhaps the act of using textisms to shorten communication words leads young adults to produce more informal writing, which may then help them to be better "informal" writers.
discovered that 46% of teens admitted to being distracted behind the wheel due to texting. One example of distraction behind the wheel is the 2008 Chatsworth train collision
, which killed 25 passengers. Upon closer investigation, it became known that the engineer of that train had sent 45 text messages while operating.
A 2009 experiment with Car and Driver
editor Eddie Alterman that took place at a deserted air strip showed that texting while driving had a bigger negative impact on driver safety than being drunk. While being legally drunk added four feet to Alterman's stopping distance while going 70 mph, reading an e-mail added 36 feet, and sending a text added 70 feet.
In 2009, the Virginia Tech
Transportation Institute released the results of an 18-month study that involved placing cameras inside the cabs of more than 100 long-haul trucks, which recorded the drivers over a combined driving distance of three million miles. The study concluded that when the drivers were texting, their risk of crashing was 23 times greater than when not texting.
A portmanteau of sex and texting, sexting was reported as early as 2005 in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, constituting a trend in the creative use of SMS to excite another with alluring messages throughout the day.
Although sexting often takes place consensually between two people, it can also occur against the wishes of a person who is the subject of the content. A number of instances have been reported in which the recipients of sexting have shared the content of the messages with others, with less intimate intentions, such as to impress their friends or embarrass their sender. Celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Vanessa Hudgens, and Adrienne Bailon have been victims of such abuses of sexting.
A 2008 survey by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com suggested a trend of sexting and other seductive online content being readily shared between teens. One in five teen girls surveyed (22 percent)—and 11 percent of teen girls aged 13–16 years old—say they have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude images of themselves. One-third (33 percent) of teen boys and one-quarter (25 percent) of teen girls say they were shown private nude or semi-nude images. According to the survey, sexually suggestive messages (text, e-mail, and instant messaging) were even more common than images, with 39 percent of teens having sent or posted such messages, and half of teens (50 percent) having received them.
Sexting becomes a legal issue when teens (under 18) are involved, because any nude photos they may send of themselves would put the recipients in possession of child pornography.
The number of students caught using mobile phones to cheat on exams has increased significantly in recent years. According to Okada (2005), most Japanese mobile phones can send and receive long text messages of between 250 and 3000 characters with graphics, video, audio, and Web links. In England, 287 school and college students were excluded from exams in 2004 for using mobile phones during exams. Some teachers and professors claim that advanced texting features can lead to students cheating on exams.
A survey conducted among mobile professionals in Europe and North America demonstrated that 94% of those surveyed believed bullying by SMS to be a reality. The survey was conducted via SMS among a pan-European and North American mobile professional audience, and 412 responded to the survey questions. The survey measured mobile professionals' opinions on bullying by SMS as well as their opinion on who should provide the protection against this threat.
Police in Tilburg
, Netherlands, started an SMS alert program, in which they would send a message to ask citizens to be vigilant when a burglar was on the loose or a child was missing in their neighborhood. Several thieves have been caught and children found using the SMS Alerts. The service has been expanding rapidly to other cities.
A Malaysian–Australian company has released its Crypto for Criminals multi-layer SMS security program.
Boston police are now turning to text messaging to help stop crime. The Boston Police Department has established a program in which one can text in a crime tip anonymously to help stop crimes.
A Malaysian court had ruled that it is legal to divorce through the use of text messaging, as long as one is clear and unequivocal.
in Sydney
resulting in the 2005 Cronulla riots
. Not only were text messages circulating in the Sydney area, but in other states as well (Daily Telegraph). The volume of such text messages and e-mails also increased in the wake of the riot. The crowd of 5000 at stages became violent, attacking certain ethnic groups. Sutherland Shire Mayor directly blamed heavily circulated SMS messages for the unrest. NSW police considered whether people could be charged over the texting. Retaliatory attacks also used SMS.
The Narre Warren Incident, when a group of 500 party goers attended a party at Narre Warren in Melbourne, Australia, and rioted in January 2008, also was a response of communication being spread by SMS and Myspace. Following the incident, the Police Commissioner wrote an open letter asking young people to be aware of the power of SMS and the Internet. In Hong Kong, government officials find that text messaging helps socially because they can send multiple texts to the community. Officials say it is an easy way of contacting community or individuals for meetings or events.
Texting was used to coordinate gatherings during the 2009 Iranian election protests
.
Text messaging has been used to turn down other political leaders. During the 2004 U.S. Democratic and Republican National Conventions, protesters used an SMS-based organizing tool called TXTmob to get to opponents. In the last day before the 2004 presidential elections in Romania, a message against Adrian Năstase
was largely circulated, thus breaking the laws that prohibited campaigning that day.
Text messaging has helped politics by promoting campaigns.
Furthermore, on January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada
of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob
. More than one million Manila residents assembled at the site of the 1986 People Power peaceful demonstrations that has toppled the Marcos regime. These people have organized themselves and coordinated their actions through text messaging. They were able to bring down a government without having to use any weapons or violence. Through text messaging, their plans and ideas were communicated to others and successfully implemented. Also, this move encouraged the military to withdraw their support from the regime, and as a result, the Estrada government fell. People were able to converge and unite with the use of their cell phones. "The rapid assembly of the anti-Estrada crowd was a hallmark of early smart mob
technology, and the millions of text messages exchanged by the demonstrators in 2001 was, by all accounts, a key to the crowds esprit de corps."
termed "Blackberry thumb
". (Although this refers to strain developed on older Blackberry devices, which had a scroll wheel on the side of the phone.)
An inflammation of the tendons in the thumb caused by constant text-messaging is also called text-messager's thumb, or texting tenosynovitis
.
Texting has also been linked as a secondary source in numerous traffic collisions, in which police
investigations of mobile phone records have found that many drivers have lost control of their cars while attempting to send or retrieve a text message. Increasing cases of Internet addiction
are now also being linked to text messaging, as mobile phones are now more likely to have e-mail and Web capabilities to complement the ability to text.
, still has lessons regarding people living in the twenty-first century. At the website of The Emily Post Institute
, the topic of texting has spurred several articles with the "do's and dont's" regarding the new form of communication. One example from the site is: "Keep your message brief. No one wants to have an entire conversation with you by texting when you could just call him or her instead."
Another example is: "Don't use all Caps. Typing a text message in all capital letters will appear as though you are shouting at the recipient, and should be avoided."
There are also generational differences in etiquette as noted in Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman's The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace. Younger Americans often do not consider it rude to answer their cell or begin texting in the middle of a face-to-face conversation with someone else, while older people, less used to the behavior and the accompanying lack of eye contact or attention, find this to be disruptive and ill-mannered.
With regard to texting in the workplace, Plantronics
studied how we communicate at work and found that 58% of US knowledge workers have increased the use of text messaging for work in the past five years. The same study found that 33% of knowledge workers felt text messaging was critical or very important to success and productivity at work.
mobile phone users through SMS prompted cellular-service carriers to take steps against the practice, before it became a widespread problem. No major spamming incidents involving SMS had been reported , but the existence of mobile phone spam has been noted by industry watchdogs including Consumer Reports
magazine and the Utility Consumers' Action Network (UCAN). In 2005, UCAN brought a case against Sprint for spamming its customers and charging $0.10 per text message. The case was settled in 2006 with Sprint agreeing not to send customers Sprint advertisements via SMS.
SMS expert Acision (foremerly LogicaCMG Telecoms) reported a new type of SMS malice at the end of 2006, noting the first instances of SMiShing (a cousin to e-mail phishing
scams). In SMiShing, users receive SMS messages posing to be from a company, enticing users to phone premium-rate numbers or reply with personal information.
, along with most other service providers, charges texters 20 cents per message if they do not have a messaging plan or if they have exceeded their allotted number of texts. Given that an SMS message is at most 160 bytes in size, this cost scales to a cost of $1,310 per megabyte sent via text message. This is in sharp contrast with the price of unlimited data plans offered by the same carriers, which allow the transmission of hundreds of megabytes of data for monthly prices of about $15 to $45 in addition to a voice plan. As a comparison, a one-minute phone call uses up the same amount of network capacity as 600 text messages, meaning that if the same cost-per-traffic formula were applied to phone calls, cell phone calls would cost $120 per minute. With service providers gaining more customers and expanding their capacity, their overhead costs should be decreasing, not increasing.
Although major cellphone providers deny any collusion, fees for out-of-package text messages have increased, doubling from 10 to 20 cents in the United States between 2007 and 2008 alone. On July 16, 2009, Senate hearings were held to look into any breach of the Sherman Antitrust Act
.
To address this issue, many companies use an SMS gateway provider based on SS7 connectivity to route the messages. The advantage of this international termination model is the ability to route data directly through SS7, which gives the provider visibility of the complete path of the SMS. This means SMS messages can be sent directly to and from recipients without having to go through the SMS-C of other mobile operators. This approach reduces the number of mobile operators that handle the message; however, it should not be considered as an end-to-end secure communication, as the content of the message is exposed to the SMS gateway provider.
Failure rates without backward notification can be high between carriers (T-Mobile to Verizon is notorious in the US). International texting can be extremlely unreliable depending on the country of origin, destination and respective carriers.
The Book of Alternative Records lists Chris Young of Salem, Oregon
, as the world-record holder for the fastest 160-character text message where the contents of the message are not provided ahead of time. His record of 62.3 seconds was set on May 23, 2007.
Elliot Nicholls of Dunedin, New Zealand, currently holds the world record for the fastest blindfolded text messaging. A record of a 160-letter text in 45 seconds while blindfolded was set on 17 November 2007, beating the old record of 1 minute 26 seconds set by an Italian in September 2006.
Ohio native Andrew Acklin is credited with the world record for most text messages sent or received in a single month, with 200,052. His accomplishments were first in the World Records Academy and later followed up by Ripley's Believe It Or Not 2010: Seeing Is Believing. He has been acknowledged by The Universal Records Database for the most text messages in a single month.
In January 2010, LG Electronics
sponsored an international competition, the LG Mobile World Cup
, to determine the fastest pair of texters. The winners were a team from South Korea, Ha Mok-min and Bae Yeong-ho.
On April 6, 2011, SKH Apps released an iPhone app, iTextFast, to allow consumers to test their texting speed and practice the paragraph used by Guinness Book of World Records. The current best time listed on Game Center for that paragraph is 34.65 seconds.
operators and expert SMS users. Several mobile phones have Morse code ring tones and alert messages. For example, many Nokia
mobile phones have an option to beep "S M S" in Morse code when it receives a short message. Some of these phones could also play the Nokia slogan "Connecting people" in Morse code as a message tone. There are third-party applications available for some mobile phones that allow Morse input for short messages.
SMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
) originated from Radio Telegraphy, it has since been extended to include messages containing image, video, and sound content (known as MMS
Multimedia Messaging Service
Multimedia Messaging Service, or MMS, is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. It extends the core SMS capability that allowed exchange of text messages only up to 160 characters in length.The most popular use is to send photographs from...
messages). The sender of a text message is known as a texter, while the service itself has different colloquialism
Colloquialism
A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...
s depending on the region: it may simply be referred to as a text in North America, India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, Australia
Australia (continent)
Australia is the world's smallest continent, comprising the mainland of Australia and proximate islands including Tasmania, New Guinea, the Aru Islands and Raja Ampat Islands...
, the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
and the United Kingdom, an SMS in most of Europe, and a TMS or SMS in the Middle East and Asia.
Text messages can be used to interact with automated systems such as ordering products and services for mobile phones or participating in contests. Advertisers and service providers use direct text marketing
Direct Text Marketing
Direct Text Marketing is a form of SMS marketing using today's modern technologies . This includes using a medium which involves text messaging over a mobile device. "82% of American adults own a cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone or other device that is also a cell phone."...
to notify mobile phone users about promotions, payment due dates and other notifications that can usually be sent by post, e-mail or voicemail
Voicemail
Voicemail is a computer based system that allows users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to individuals, organizations, products and services, using an ordinary telephone...
.
In a straight and concise definition for the purposes of this English Language article, text messaging by phones or mobile phones should include all 26 letters of the alphabet and 10 numerals, i.e., alpha-numeric messages, or text, to be sent by texter or received by the textee.
History
SMSSMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
messaging was first used in December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group
Sema Group
Sema Group plc was an Anglo-French IT services company. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but was acquired by Schlumberger in 2001.-History:...
(now Airwide Solutions
Airwide Solutions
Airwide Solutions was a privately held United States-based mobile messaging and wireless internet infrastructure company. It was acquired by Mavenir Systems in May 2011....
), used a personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
to send the text message "Merry Christmas" via the Vodafone
Vodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
network to the phone of Richard Jarvis.
Standard SMS
SMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
messaging uses 140 byte
Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...
s per message, which translates to 160 characters of the English alphabet using 7-bit
Bit
A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...
encoding or as few as 70 characters for languages using non-Latin alphabets using UTF-16 encoding. (The commonly cited limit of 140 characters is imposed by some services like Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
that reserve 20 characters for non-message content, like addressing.)
Initial growth of text messaging was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 message per GSM customer per month. One factor in the slow take-up of SMS was that operators were slow to set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and eliminate billing fraud, which was possible by changing SMSC
Short message service center
A short message service center is a network element in the mobile telephone network which delivers SMS messages.-Operation:When a user sends a text message to another user, the message gets stored in the SMSC which delivers it to the destination user when they are available...
settings on individual handsets to use the SMSCs of other operators. Over time, this issue was eliminated by switch-billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it.
SMS is available on a wide range of networks, including 3G
3G
3G or 3rd generation mobile telecommunications is a generation of standards for mobile phones and mobile telecommunication services fulfilling the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 specifications by the International Telecommunication Union...
networks. However, not all text messaging systems use SMS, and some notable alternate implementations of the concept include J-Phone's SkyMail and NTT Docomo
NTT DoCoMo
is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese. Docomo provides phone, video phone , i-mode , and mail services...
's Short Mail, both in Japan. E-mail messaging from phones, as popularized by NTT Docomo's i-mode
I-mode
NTT DoCoMo's i-mode is a mobile internet service popular in Japan. Unlike Wireless Application Protocol, i-mode encompasses a wider variety of internet standards, including web access, e-mail and the packet-switched network that delivers the data...
and the RIM BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
, also typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail transmission across Internet Protocol networks. SMTP was first defined by RFC 821 , and last updated by RFC 5321 which includes the extended SMTP additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today...
over TCP/IP
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this...
.
Today, text messaging is 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, at end of 2007 being active users of the Short Message Service. In countries such as Finland, Sweden and Norway, over 85% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 80%, and North America is rapidly catching up with over 60% active users of SMS by end of 2008. The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers is in the Philippines, with an average of 27 texts sent per day by subscriber.
Uses
Text messaging is most often used between private mobile phone users, as a substitute for voice calls in situations where voice communication is impossible or undesirable. In some regions, text messaging is significantly cheaper than placing a phone call to another mobile phone; elsewhere, text messaging is popular despite the negligible cost of voice calls.Some text messages such as SMS
SMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
can also be used for the remote controlling of appliances. It is widely used in domotics systems. Some amateurs have also built own systems to control (some of) their appliances via SMS.
A Flash SMS is a type of text message that appears directly on the main screen without user interaction and is not automatically stored in the inbox. I can be usefull in cases such as an emergency
Emergency
An emergency is a situation that poses an immediate risk to health, life, property or environment. Most emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent a worsening of the situation, although in some situations, mitigation may not be possible and agencies may only be able to offer palliative...
(e.g. fire alarm
Fire alarm system
An automatic fire alarm system is designed to detect the unwanted presence of fire by monitoring environmental changes associated with combustion. In general, a fire alarm system is classified as either automatically actuated, manually actuated, or both...
) or confidentiality
Confidentiality
Confidentiality is an ethical principle associated with several professions . In ethics, and in law and alternative forms of legal resolution such as mediation, some types of communication between a person and one of these professionals are "privileged" and may not be discussed or divulged to...
(e.g. one-time password
One-time password
A one-time password is a password that is valid for only one login session or transaction. OTPs avoid a number of shortcomings that are associated with traditional passwords. The most important shortcoming that is addressed by OTPs is that, in contrast to static passwords, they are not vulnerable...
).
Short message services are developing very rapidly throughout the world.
SMS is particularly popular in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan; see below), United States, Australia and New Zealand and is also gaining influence in Africa. Popularity has grown to a sufficient extent that the term texting (used as a verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
meaning the act of mobile phone users sending short messages back and forth) has entered the common lexicon. Young Asians consider SMS as the most popular mobile phone application.
In China, SMS is very popular and has brought service providers significant profit (18 billion short messages were sent in 2001). It is a very influential and powerful tool in the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
, where the average user sends 10–12 text messages a day. The Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
alone sends on the average 400 million text messages a day, or approximately 142 billion text messages sent a year, more than the annual average SMS volume of the countries in Europe, and even China and India. SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores updates, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS.
Texting became popular in the Philippines in 1998. In 2001, text messaging played an important role in deposing former Philippine president Joseph Estrada
Joseph Estrada
Joseph "Erap" Ejercito Estrada was the 13th President of the Philippines, serving from 1998 until 2001. Estrada was the first person in the Post-EDSA era to be elected both to the presidency and vice-presidency.Estrada gained popularity as a film actor, playing the lead role in over 100 films in...
. Similarly, in 2008, text messaging played a primary role in the implication of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick
Kwame Kilpatrick
Kwame Malik Kilpatrick is a former mayor of Detroit, Michigan. Kilpatrick's mayorship was plagued by numerous scandals and rampant accusations of corruption, with the mayor eventually resigning after being charged with ten felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice...
in an SMS sex scandal.
Short messages are particularly popular among young urbanites. In many markets, the service is comparatively cheap. For example, in Australia, a message typically costs between A$
Australian dollar
The Australian dollar is the currency of the Commonwealth of Australia, including Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, and Norfolk Island, as well as the independent Pacific Island states of Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu...
0.20 and $0.25 to send (some prepaid services charge $0.01 between their own phones), compared with a voice call, which costs somewhere between $0.40 and $2.00 per minute (commonly charged in half-minute blocks). Despite the low cost to the consumer, the service is enormously profitable to the service providers. At a typical length of only 190 bytes (including protocol overhead), more than 350 of these messages per minute can be transmitted at the same data rate as a usual voice call (9 kbit/s). There are also free SMS services available, which are often sponsored and allow sending SMS from a PC connected to the internet.
Mobile service providers in New Zealand, such as Vodafone
Vodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
and Telecom NZ, provide up to 2000 SMS messages for NZ$10 per month. Users on these plans send on average 1500 SMS messages every month.
Text messaging has become so popular that advertising agencies and advertisers are now jumping into the text messaging business. Services that provide bulk text message sending are also becoming a popular way for clubs, associations, and advertisers to reach a group of opt-in subscribers quickly.
Emergency services
In some countries, text messages can be used to contact the emergency services. In the UK, text messages can be used to call the emergency services after registering with the emergencySMS service. This service is primarily aimed at people who, by reason of disability, are unable to make a voice call, but has recently been promoted as a means for walkers and climbers to call emergency services from areas where a voice call is not possible due to low signal strength.Commercial uses
Short codes
Short codes are special telephone numbers, shorter than full telephone numbers, that can be used to address SMS and MMS messages from mobile phones or fixed phones. There are two types of short codes: dialing and messaging.Text messaging gateway providers
SMS gateway providers facilitate the SMS traffic between businesses and mobile subscribers, being mainly responsible for carrying mission-critical messages, SMS for enterprises, content delivery and entertainment services involving SMS, e.g., TV voting. Considering SMS messaging performance and cost, as well as the level of text messaging services, SMS gateway providers can be classified as resellers of the text messaging capability of another provider's SMSCShort message service center
A short message service center is a network element in the mobile telephone network which delivers SMS messages.-Operation:When a user sends a text message to another user, the message gets stored in the SMSC which delivers it to the destination user when they are available...
and/or offering the text messaging capability as an operator of their own SMSC
Short message service center
A short message service center is a network element in the mobile telephone network which delivers SMS messages.-Operation:When a user sends a text message to another user, the message gets stored in the SMSC which delivers it to the destination user when they are available...
with SS7.
SMS messaging gateway providers can provide gateway-to-mobile (Mobile Terminated–MT) services. Some suppliers can also supply mobile-to-gateway (text-in or Mobile Originated/MO services). Many operate text-in services on shortcodes or mobile number ranges, whereas others use lower-cost geographic text-in numbers.
Premium content
SMS is widely used for delivering digital content, such as news alerts, financial information, logos and ringtones. Such messages are also known as premium-rated short messages (PSMS). The subscribers are charged extra for receiving this premium content, and the amount is typically divided between the mobile network operatorMobile network operator
A mobile network operator , also known as mobile phone operator , carrier service provider , wireless service provider, wireless carrier, or cellular company, or mobile network carrier is a telephone company that provides services for mobile phone subscribers.One essential...
and the value added service provider
Value-added service
A value-added service is popular as a telecommunications industry term for non-core services, or in short, all services beyond standard voice calls and fax transmissions. However, it can be used in any service industry, for services available at little or no cost, to promote their primary business...
(VASP), either through revenue share or a fixed transport fee. Services like 82ASK and Any Question Answered have used the PSMS model to enable rapid response to mobile consumers' questions, using on-call teams of experts and researchers.
Premium short messages are increasingly being used for "real-world" services. For example, some vending machines now allow payment by sending a premium-rated short message, so that the cost of the item bought is added to the user's phone bill or subtracted from the user's prepaid credits. Recently, premium messaging companies have come under fire from consumer groups due to a large number of consumers racking up huge phone bills.
A new type of free-premium or hybrid-premium content has emerged with the launch of text-service websites. These sites allow registered users to receive free text messages when items they are interested in go on sale, or when new items are introduced.
An alternative to inbound SMS is based on long numbers (international mobile number format, e.g., +44 7624 805000, or geographic numbers that can handle voice and SMS, e.g., 01133203040), which can be used in place of short codes or premium-rated short messages for SMS reception in several applications, such as TV voting, product promotions, and campaigns. Long numbers are internationally available, as well as enabling businesses to have their own number, rather than short codes, which are usually shared across a lot of brands. Additionally, Long numbers are non-premium inbound numbers.
In business
The use of text messaging for business purposes has grown significantly during the mid-2000s. As companies seek competitive advantages, many employees turn to new technology, collaborative applications, and real-time messaging such as SMS, instant messagingInstant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
, and mobile communications. Some practical uses of text messaging include the fuse of SMS for confirming delivery or other tasks, for instant communication between a service provider and a client (e.g., stock broker and investor), and for sending alerts. Several universities have implemented a system of texting students and faculties campus alerts. One such example is Penn State
Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University, commonly referred to as Penn State or PSU, is a public research university with campuses and facilities throughout the state of Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855, the university has a threefold mission of teaching, research, and public service...
.
As text messaging has proliferated in business, so too have regulations governing its use. One regulation specifically governing the use of text messaging in financial-services firms engaged in stocks, equities, and securities trading is Regulatory Notice 07-59, Supervision of Electronic Communications, December 2007, issued to member firms by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
In the United States, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc., or FINRA, is a private corporation that acts as a self-regulatory organization . FINRA is the successor to the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. ...
. In 07-59, FINRA noted that "electronic communications", "e-mail", and "electronic correspondence" may be used interchangeably and can include such forms of electronic messaging as instant messaging and text messaging. Industry has had to develop new technology to allow companies to archive their employees' text messages.
Security, confidentiality, reliability and speed of SMS are among the most important guarantees industries such as financial services, energy and commodities trading, health care and enterprises demand in their mission-critical procedures. One way to guarantee such a quality of text messaging lies in introducing SLAs (Service Level Agreement
Service Level Agreement
A service-level agreement is a part of a service contract where the level of service is formally defined. In practice, the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time or performance...
), which are common in IT contracts. By providing measurable SLAs, corporations can define reliability parameters and set up a high quality of their services. Just one of many SMS applications that has proven highly popular and successful in the financial-services industry is mobile receipts. In January 2009, Mobile Marketing Association
Mobile marketing association
The Mobile Marketing Association is a global non-profit trade association established to foster growth of mobile marketing. The MMA's stated goals are to clear obstacles to market development, establish mobile media [guidelines and best practices] for sustainable growth, and evangelize the use of...
(MMA) published the Mobile Banking Overview for financial institutions in which it discussed the advantages and disadvantages of mobile channel platforms such as Short Message Services (SMS
SMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
), Mobile Web, Mobile Client Applications, SMS with Mobile Web and Secure SMS.
Mobile interaction services are an alternative way of using SMS in business communications with greater certainty.
Typical business-to-business applications are telematics
Telematics
Telematics typically is any integrated use of telecommunications and informatics, also known as ICT...
and Machine-to-Machine, in which two applications automatically communicate with each other. Incident alerts are also common, and staff communications are also another use for B2B scenarios.
Businesses can use SMS for time-critical alerts, updates and reminders, mobile campaigns, content and entertainment applications.
Mobile interaction can also be used for consumer-to-business interactions, such as media voting and competitions, and for consumer-to-consumer interaction, for example, with mobile social networking, chatting and dating.
Europe
Europe follows next behind Asia in terms of the popularity of the use of SMS. In 2003, an average of 16 billion messages were sent each month. Users in Spain sent a little more than fifty messages per month on average in 2003. In Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, the figure was around 35–40 SMS messages per month. In each of these countries, the cost of sending an SMS message varies from €0.04–0.23, depending on the payment plan (with many contractual plans including all or a number of texts for free). In the United Kingdom, text messages are charged between £0.05–0.12. Curiously, France has not taken to SMS in the same way, sending just under 20 messages on average per user per month. France has the same GSM technology as other European countries, so the uptake is not hampered by technical restrictions.In the Republic of Ireland
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
, a total of 1.5 billion messages are sent every quarter, on average 114 messages per person per month. In the United Kingdom over 1 billion text messages are sent every week.
The Eurovision Song Contest
Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual competition held among active member countries of the European Broadcasting Union .Each member country submits a song to be performed on live television and then casts votes for the other countries' songs to determine the most popular song in the competition...
organized the first pan-European SMS voting in 2002, as a part of the voting system (there was also a voting over traditional phone lines). In 2005, the Eurovision Song Contest organized the biggest televoting ever (with SMS and phone voting).
During roaming
Roaming
In wireless telecommunications, roaming is a general term referring to the extension of connectivity service in a location that is different from the home location where the service was registered. Roaming ensures that the wireless device is kept connected to the network, without losing the...
, that is, when a user connects to another network in different country from his own, the prices may be higher, but in July 2009, EU
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
legislation went into effect limiting this price to €0.11.
United States
In the United States, text messaging is also popular; as reported by CTIA in December 2009, the 286 million US subscribers sent 152.7 billion text messages per month, for an average of 534 messages per subscriber per month. The Pew Research Center found in May 2010 that 72% of U.S. adult cellphone users send and receive text messages.In the U.S., SMS is often charged both at the sender and at the destination, but, unlike phone calls, it cannot be rejected or dismissed. The reasons for lower uptake than other countries are varied—many users have unlimited "mobile-to-mobile" minutes, high monthly minute allotments, or unlimited service. Moreover, push to talk
Push to talk
Push-to-talk , also known as Press-to-Transmit, is a method of conversing on half-duplex communication lines, including two-way radio, using a momentary button to switch from voice reception mode to transmit mode....
services offer the instant connectivity of SMS and are typically unlimited. Furthermore, the integration between competing providers and technologies necessary for cross-network text messaging has only been available recently. Some providers originally charged extra to enable use of text, further reducing its usefulness and appeal. In the third quarter of 2006, at least 12 billion text messages crossed AT&T's network, up almost 15 percent from the preceding quarter.
In the United States, while texting is widely popular among the ages of 13–22 years old, it is increasing among adults and business users as well. The age that a child receives his/her first cell phone has also decreased, making text messaging a very popular way of communication for all ages. Texting has become so involved in the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
lifestyle that text poet Norman Silver published his "10 Txt Commandments". The number of texts being sent in the United States has gone up over the years as the price has gone down to an average of $0.10 per text sent and received.
In order to convince more customers to include text messaging plans, some major cellphone providers have recently increased the price to send and receive text messages from $.15 to $.20 per message. This is over $1,300 per megabyte
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
. Many providers offer unlimited plans, in which texting is mostly free.
Finland
In addition to SMS voting, a different phenomenon has risen in more mobile-phone-saturated countries. In Finland, some TV channels began "SMS chat", which involved sending short messages to a phone number, and the messages would be shown on TV a while later. Chats are always moderated, which prevents sending harmful material to the channel. The craze soon became popular and evolved into games, at first slow-paced quiz and strategy games. After a while, faster-paced games were designed for television and SMS control. Games tend to involve registering one's nickname and, after that, sending short messages for controlling a character on screen. Messages usually cost 0.05 to 0.86 EuroEuro
The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...
apiece, and games can require the player to send dozens of messages. In December 2003, a Finnish TV channel, MTV3
MTV3
MTV3 is a Finnish commercial television station owned by Bonnier. It had the biggest audience share of all Finnish TV channels until Finnish Broadcasting Company’s YLE1 took the lead. The letters MTV stand for Mainos-TV , due to the channel getting its revenue from running commercials...
, put a Santa Claus
Santa Claus
Santa Claus is a folklore figure in various cultures who distributes gifts to children, normally on Christmas Eve. Each name is a variation of Saint Nicholas, but refers to Santa Claus...
character on air reading aloud messages sent in by viewers. On March 12, 2004, the first entirely "interactive" TV channel, VIISI, began operation in Finland. That did not last long, as SBS Finland Oy took over the channel and turned it into a music channel named The Voice in November 2004.
In 2006, the Prime Minister of Finland
Prime Minister of Finland
The Prime Minister is the Head of Government of Finland. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President, who is the Head of State. The current Prime Minister is Jyrki Katainen of the National Coalition Party.-Overview:...
, Matti Vanhanen
Matti Vanhanen
Matti Taneli Vanhanen is a Finnish politician. He is a former Prime Minister of Finland and a former Chairman of the Centre Party. In the second half of 2006 he was President of the European Council. In his earlier career he was a journalist...
, made front-page news when he allegedly broke up with his girlfriend with a text message.
In 2007, the first book written solely in text messages, Viimeiset viestit (Last Messages), was released by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala
Hannu Luntiala
Hannu Veikko Luntiala is the Director General of the Population Register Centre in Finland and an author for Tammi, a Finnish publishing company.- Career at Population Register Centre :...
. It is about a business executive who travels throughout Europe and India.
Mobile-service providers in Finland offer contracts in which one can send 1000 text messages a month for the price of €10.
Japan
Japan was among the first countries to adopt short messages widely, with pioneering non-GSM services including J-Phone's SkyMail and NTT DocomoNTT DoCoMo
is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese. Docomo provides phone, video phone , i-mode , and mail services...
's Short Mail. Japanese adolescents first began text messaging, because it was a cheaper form of communication than the other available forms. Thus, Japanese theorists created the selective interpersonal relationship theory, claiming that mobile phones can change social networks among young people (classified as 13- to 30-year-olds). They theorized this age group had extensive but low-quality relationships with friends, and mobile-phone usage may facilitate improvement in the quality of their relationships. They concluded this age group prefers "selective interpersonal relationships in which they maintain particular, partial, but rich relations, depending on the situation." The same studies showed participants rated friendships in which they communicated face-to-face and through text messaging as being more intimate than those in which they communicated solely face-to-face. This indicates participants make new relationships with face-to-face communication at an early stage, but use text messaging to increase their contact later on. It is also interesting to note that as the relationships between participants grew more intimate, the frequency of text messaging also increased.
However, short messaging has been largely rendered obsolete by the prevalence of mobile Internet e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, which can be sent to and received from any e-mail address, mobile or otherwise. That said, while usually presented to the user simply as a uniform "mail" service (and most users are unaware of the distinction), the operators may still internally transmit the content as short messages, especially if the destination is on the same network.
China
Text messaging is popular and cheap in China. About 700 billion messages were sent in 2007.Text message spam is also a problem in China. In 2007, 353.8 billion spam messages were sent, up 93% from the previous year. It is about 12.44 messages per week per person.
It is routine that the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
government monitor text messages across the country for illegal content.
Among Chinese migrant workers with little formal education, it is common to refer to SMS manuals when text messaging. These manuals are published as cheap, handy, smaller-than-pocket-size booklets that offer diverse linguistic phrases to use as messages.
Philippines
In 1995, Short Message Service was introduced as a promotional gimmick but soon became very popular. In 1998, Philippine mobile-service providers launched SMS as part of their services, with initial television marketing campaigns targeting hearing-impaired users. The service was initially free with subscriptions, but Filipinos quickly exploited the feature to communicate for free instead of using voice calls, which they would be charged for. After Telcos caught on to this, they soon started charging for SMS. The current rate across networks is 1 peso per SMS (about US$0.023). Though users were now charged for SMS, it remained very cheap, about one-tenth of the price of a voice call. This low price led to about five million Filipinos owning a cell phone by 2001.Because of the highly social nature of Philippine culture and the affordability of SMS compared to voice calls, SMS usage shot up, and texting quickly became a popular tool for Filipinos to keep in touch with their friends and loved ones. Filipinos used texting not only for social but also for political purposes, as it allowed the Filipinos to express their opinions on current events and political issues. As a result, it became a powerful tool for Filipinos in promoting or denouncing certain issues and was a key factor during the 2001 EDSA II revolution, which overthrew then-President Joseph Estrada
Joseph Estrada
Joseph "Erap" Ejercito Estrada was the 13th President of the Philippines, serving from 1998 until 2001. Estrada was the first person in the Post-EDSA era to be elected both to the presidency and vice-presidency.Estrada gained popularity as a film actor, playing the lead role in over 100 films in...
, who was eventually found guilty of plunder.
According to 2009 stats, there are about 72 million mobile-service subscriptions (roughly 80% of the Filipino population), with around 1.39 billion SMS messages being sent in the Philippines daily. Because of the large amount of text messages being sent by Filipinos, the Philippines became known as the "text capital of the world" during the late 1990s until the early 2000s.
New Zealand
There are three main telecommunication company networks in New Zealand. Telecom NZ was the first telecommunication company in New Zealand and owns all the land lines; however, it also leases them out for other companies to use. VodafoneVodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
acquired Bellsouth New Zealand in 1998 and claims to hold 53.7% of New Zealand's mobile market as of 30 December 2007, and 2degrees
2degrees
2degrees is a U.S. and British owned mobile phone provider operating in New Zealand with 580,112 customers . They launched on 5 August 2009 after 9 years of planning. 2degrees currently offers prepaid and pay monthly mobile services...
arrived in 2009. As of 2005, around 85% of the adult population had a mobile phone. In general, texting is more popular than phone calls, as it is viewed as less intrusive and therefore more polite.
Africa
Text messaging will become a key revenue driver for mobile network operators in Africa over the next couple of years. Today, text messaging is already slowly gaining influence in the African market. One such person used text messaging to spread the word about HIV and AIDS, something that significantly impacts Africans. Also, in September 2009, a multi-country campaign in Africa used text messaging to expose stock-outs of essential medicines at public health facilities and put pressure on governments to address the issue. It's encouraging to see text messaging as a means to spread the word about health issues in Africa, the use of which is somewhat different from other continents.Social impact
The advent of text messaging made possible new forms of interaction that were not possible before. A person may now carry out a conversation with another user without the constraint of being expected to reply within a short amount of time and without needing to set time aside to engage in conversation. Mobile phone users can maintain communication during situations in which a voice call is impractical, impossible, or unacceptable. Texting has provided a venue for participatory cultureParticipatory culture
Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture — in other words a culture in which private persons do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers . The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published...
, allowing viewers to vote in online and TV polls, as well as receive information on the move. Texting can also bring people together and create a sense of community through "Smart Mobs" or "Net War", which create "people power".
Effect on language
The small phone keypadTelephone keypad
A telephone keypad is a keypad that appears on a "Touch Tone" telephone. It was standardised when the dual-tone multi-frequency system in the new push-button telephone was introduced in the 1960s, which gradually replaced the rotary dial....
has caused a number of adaptations of spelling: as in the phrase "txt msg", "lol", "brb", "HMU", or use of CamelCase
CamelCase
CamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
, such as in "ThisIsVeryLame". To avoid the even more limited message lengths allowed when using Cyrillic
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
or Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
letters, speakers of languages written in those alphabets often use the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
for their own language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
.
In certain languages utilizing diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
marks, such as Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, SMS technology created an entire new variant of written language: characters normally written with diacritic marks (e.g., ą
A
A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...
, ę
E
E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...
, ś
S
S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent...
, ż
Z
Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal...
in Polish) are now being written without them (as a, e, s, z) to enable using cell phones without Polish script
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
or to save space in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
messages.
Historically, this language developed out of shorthand used in bulletin board system
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
s and later in Internet chat room
Chat room
The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing...
s, where users would abbreviate some words to allow a response to be typed more quickly, though the amount of time saved was often inconsequential. However, this became much more pronounced in SMS, where mobile phone users do not generally have access to a QWERTY
QWERTY
QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
keyboard as computer users did, more effort is required to type each character, and there is a limit on the number of characters that may be sent.
In Mandarin Chinese, numbers that sound similar to words are used in place of those words. For example, the numbers 520 in Chinese (wu er ling) sound like the words for "I love you" (wo ai ni). The sequence 748 (qi si ba) sounds like the curse "go to hell" (qu si ba).
Predictive text
Predictive text
Predictive text is an input technology used where one key or button represents many letters, such as on mobile phones and in accessibility technologies. Each key press results in a prediction rather than repeatedly sequencing through the same group of "letters" it represents, in the same,...
software, which attempts to guess words (Tegic
Tegic
Tegic was a predictive text company based in Seattle, Washington, United States. It was acquired by AOL on December 3, 1999, and subsequently, on August 24, 2007, acquired by Nuance Communications, whereafter it ceased to exist as a separate company....
's T9
T9 (predictive text)
T9, which stands for Text on 9 keys, is a patented predictive text technology for mobile phones, originally developed by Tegic Communications, now part of Nuance Communications....
as well as iTAP) or letters
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
(Eatoni's LetterWise
LetterWise
LetterWise is a patented predictive text entry system keypads on handheld devices developed by Eatoni Ergonomics.- Design :Unlike other predictive text entry systems, LetterWise does not depend on a dictionary, allowing the user to type anything, yet with very high efficiency...
), reduces the labour of time-consuming input. This makes abbreviations not only less necessary, but slower to type than regular words that are in the software's dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
; however, it does make the messages longer, often requiring the text message to be sent in multiple parts and, therefore, costing more to send.
The use of text messaging has changed the way that people talk and write essays, some believing it to be harmful. In November 2006, New Zealand Qualifications Authority approved the move that allowed students of secondary schools to use mobile phone text language in the end-of-the-year-exam papers. Highly publicized reports, beginning in 2002, of the use of text language in school assignments caused some to become concerned that the quality of written communication is on the decline, and other reports claim that teachers and professors are beginning to have a hard time controlling the problem. However, the notion that text language is widespread or harmful is refuted by research from linguistic experts.
An article in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
explores how text messaging has anglicized
Anglicisation
Anglicisation, or anglicization , is the process of converting verbal or written elements of any other language into a form that is more comprehensible to an English speaker, or, more generally, of altering something such that it becomes English in form or character.The term most often refers to...
some of the world's languages. The use of diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
marks is dropped in languages such as French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, as well as symbols in Ethiopian languages
Ethiopian Semitic languages
Ethiopian Semitic is a language group, which together with Old South Arabian forms the Western branch of the South Semitic languages. The languages are spoken in both Ethiopia and Eritrea...
. In his book, Txtng: the Gr8 Db8
Txtng: the Gr8 Db8
Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 is a book written by linguist David Crystal.The title is a logogram which stands for Texting: The Great Debate. In his book, Crystal examines the use of text messaging and its effect on language and literacy...
, David Crystal
David Crystal
David Crystal OBE FLSW FBA is a linguist, academic and author.-Background and career:Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. He grew up in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England where he attended St Mary's College from 1951....
says that texters in all eleven languages use "lol", "u", "brb", and "gr8", all English-based shorthands. The use of pictograms and logograms in texts are present in every language. They shorten words by using symbols to represent the word or symbols whose name sounds like a syllable of the word such as in 2day or b4. This is commonly used in other languages as well. Crystal gives some examples in several languages such as Italian sei, "six", is used for sei, "you are". Example: dv 6 = dove sei ("where are you") and French sept "seven" = cassette ("casette"). There is also the use of numeral sequences, substituting for several syllables of a word and creating whole phrases using numerals. For example, in French, a12c4 can be said as à un de ces quatres, "see you around" (literally: "to one of these four [days]"). An example of using symbols in texting and borrowing from English is the use of @. Whenever it is used in texting, its intended use is with the English pronunciation. Crystal gives the example of the Welsh use of @ in @F, pronounced ataf, meaning "to me". In character-based languages such as Chinese and Japanese, numbers are assigned syllables based on the shortened form of the pronunciation of the number, sometimes the English pronunciation of the number. In this way, numbers alone can be used to communicate whole passages, such as in Chinese, "8807701314520" can be literally translated as "Hug hug you, kiss kiss you, whole life, whole life I love you." English influences worldwide texting in variation but still in combination with the individual properties of languages.
American popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
is also recognized in shorthand. For example, Homer Simpson
Homer Simpson
Homer Jay Simpson is a fictional character in the animated television series The Simpsons and the patriarch of the eponymous family. He is voiced by Dan Castellaneta and first appeared on television, along with the rest of his family, in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987...
translates into: ~(_8^(|). Crystal also suggests that texting has led to more creativity in the English language, giving people opportunities to create their own slang, emoticons, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. The feeling of individualism and freedom excites people, making texting increasingly more popular and a more efficient way to communicate.
Recent research by Rosen et al. (2009) found that those young adults who used more language-based textisms (shortcuts such as LOL, 2nite, etc.) in daily writing produced worse formal writing than those young adults who used fewer linguistic textisms in daily writing. However, the exact opposite was true for informal writing. This suggests that perhaps the act of using textisms to shorten communication words leads young adults to produce more informal writing, which may then help them to be better "informal" writers.
Texting while driving
Texting while driving leads to increased distraction behind the wheel. In 2006, Liberty Mutual Insurance Group conducted a survey with more than 900 teens from over 26 high schools nationwide. The results showed that 87% of students found texting to be "very" or "extremely" distracting. Then later on, a study by AAAAmerican Automobile Association
AAA , formerly known as the American Automobile Association, is a federation of 51 independently operated motor clubs throughout North America. AAA is a not-for-profit member service organization with more than 51 million members. AAA provides services to its members such as travel, automotive,...
discovered that 46% of teens admitted to being distracted behind the wheel due to texting. One example of distraction behind the wheel is the 2008 Chatsworth train collision
2008 Chatsworth train collision
The Chatsworth train collision occurred at 16:22 PDT on Friday September 12, 2008, when a Union Pacific freight train and a Metrolink commuter train collided head-on in the Chatsworth district of Los Angeles, California, in the United States...
, which killed 25 passengers. Upon closer investigation, it became known that the engineer of that train had sent 45 text messages while operating.
A 2009 experiment with Car and Driver
Car and Driver
Car and Driver is an American automotive enthusiast magazine. Its total circulation is 1.31 million. It is owned by Hearst Magazines, who purchased prior owner Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. in 2011...
editor Eddie Alterman that took place at a deserted air strip showed that texting while driving had a bigger negative impact on driver safety than being drunk. While being legally drunk added four feet to Alterman's stopping distance while going 70 mph, reading an e-mail added 36 feet, and sending a text added 70 feet.
In 2009, the Virginia Tech
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, popularly known as Virginia Tech , is a public land-grant university with the main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia with other research and educational centers throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States, and internationally.Founded in...
Transportation Institute released the results of an 18-month study that involved placing cameras inside the cabs of more than 100 long-haul trucks, which recorded the drivers over a combined driving distance of three million miles. The study concluded that when the drivers were texting, their risk of crashing was 23 times greater than when not texting.
Sexting
Sexting is slang for the act of sending sexually explicit or suggestive content between mobile devices using SMS. A genre of texting, it contains either text, images, or video that is intended to be sexually arousing.A portmanteau of sex and texting, sexting was reported as early as 2005 in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, constituting a trend in the creative use of SMS to excite another with alluring messages throughout the day.
Although sexting often takes place consensually between two people, it can also occur against the wishes of a person who is the subject of the content. A number of instances have been reported in which the recipients of sexting have shared the content of the messages with others, with less intimate intentions, such as to impress their friends or embarrass their sender. Celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Vanessa Hudgens, and Adrienne Bailon have been victims of such abuses of sexting.
A 2008 survey by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com suggested a trend of sexting and other seductive online content being readily shared between teens. One in five teen girls surveyed (22 percent)—and 11 percent of teen girls aged 13–16 years old—say they have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude images of themselves. One-third (33 percent) of teen boys and one-quarter (25 percent) of teen girls say they were shown private nude or semi-nude images. According to the survey, sexually suggestive messages (text, e-mail, and instant messaging) were even more common than images, with 39 percent of teens having sent or posted such messages, and half of teens (50 percent) having received them.
Sexting becomes a legal issue when teens (under 18) are involved, because any nude photos they may send of themselves would put the recipients in possession of child pornography.
In schools
Text messaging has had an impact on students academically, by creating an easier way to cheat on exams. In December 2002, a dozen students were caught cheating on an accounting exam through the use of text messages on their mobile phones. In December 2002, Hitotsubashi University in Japan failed 26 students for receiving e-mailed exam answers on their mobile phones.The number of students caught using mobile phones to cheat on exams has increased significantly in recent years. According to Okada (2005), most Japanese mobile phones can send and receive long text messages of between 250 and 3000 characters with graphics, video, audio, and Web links. In England, 287 school and college students were excluded from exams in 2004 for using mobile phones during exams. Some teachers and professors claim that advanced texting features can lead to students cheating on exams.
Bullying
Spreading rumors and gossip by text is also an issue of great concern. Text "bullying" of this sort can cause distress and damage reputations. Harding and Rosenberg (2005) argue that the urge to forward text messages seems difficult to resist, describing text messages as "loaded weapons".A survey conducted among mobile professionals in Europe and North America demonstrated that 94% of those surveyed believed bullying by SMS to be a reality. The survey was conducted via SMS among a pan-European and North American mobile professional audience, and 412 responded to the survey questions. The survey measured mobile professionals' opinions on bullying by SMS as well as their opinion on who should provide the protection against this threat.
Influence on perceptions of the student
When a student sends an email that contains phonetic abbreviations and acronyms that are common in text messaging (e.g., "gr8" instead of "great"), it can influence how that student is subsequently evaluated. In a study by Lewandowski and Harrington (2006), participants read a student's email sent to a professor that either contained text-messaging abbreviations (gr8, How R U?) or parallel text in standard English (great, How are you?), and then provided impressions of the sender. Students who used abbreviations in their email were perceived as having a less favorable personality and as putting forth less effort on an essay they submitted along with the email. Specifically, abbreviation users were seen as less intelligent, responsible, motivated, studious, dependable, and hard-working. These findings suggest that the nature of a student's email communication can influence how others perceive the student and their work.Law and crime
Not only has text messaging had an impact in schools, but also on police forces around the world. A British company developed, in June 2003, a program called Fortress SMS for Symbian phones. This program used 128 bit AES encryption to protect SMS messages. Police have also retrieved deleted messages to incriminate cult member Sara Svensson after confessing to murdering the wife of pastor Helge Fossmo and having shot his lover's husband Daniel Linde in Knutby, Sweden. They traced the messages, because she said she had acted anonymously on text forwards received in her phone.Police in Tilburg
Tilburg
Tilburg is a landlocked municipality and a city in the Netherlands, located in the southern province of Noord-Brabant.Tilburg municipality also includes the villages of Berkel-Enschot and Udenhout....
, Netherlands, started an SMS alert program, in which they would send a message to ask citizens to be vigilant when a burglar was on the loose or a child was missing in their neighborhood. Several thieves have been caught and children found using the SMS Alerts. The service has been expanding rapidly to other cities.
A Malaysian–Australian company has released its Crypto for Criminals multi-layer SMS security program.
Boston police are now turning to text messaging to help stop crime. The Boston Police Department has established a program in which one can text in a crime tip anonymously to help stop crimes.
A Malaysian court had ruled that it is legal to divorce through the use of text messaging, as long as one is clear and unequivocal.
Social unrest
Texting has been used on a number of occasions with the result of the gathering of large aggressive crowds. SMS messaging drew a crowd to Cronulla BeachCronulla Beach
Cronulla Beach , is a patrolled beach on Bate Bay, in Cronulla, New South Wales, Australia. The Cronulla Pavilion and the Cronulla Lifesaving Club are two prominent buildings located close to the sand. Cronulla Park sits behind the beach. The Cronulla Rock Pools are between Cronulla Beach and North...
in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
resulting in the 2005 Cronulla riots
2005 Cronulla riots
The 2005 Cronulla riots were a series of sectarian clashes and mob violence originating in Cronulla, New South Wales and spreading, over the next few nights, to additional Sydney suburbs....
. Not only were text messages circulating in the Sydney area, but in other states as well (Daily Telegraph). The volume of such text messages and e-mails also increased in the wake of the riot. The crowd of 5000 at stages became violent, attacking certain ethnic groups. Sutherland Shire Mayor directly blamed heavily circulated SMS messages for the unrest. NSW police considered whether people could be charged over the texting. Retaliatory attacks also used SMS.
The Narre Warren Incident, when a group of 500 party goers attended a party at Narre Warren in Melbourne, Australia, and rioted in January 2008, also was a response of communication being spread by SMS and Myspace. Following the incident, the Police Commissioner wrote an open letter asking young people to be aware of the power of SMS and the Internet. In Hong Kong, government officials find that text messaging helps socially because they can send multiple texts to the community. Officials say it is an easy way of contacting community or individuals for meetings or events.
Texting was used to coordinate gatherings during the 2009 Iranian election protests
2009 Iranian election protests
Protests following the 2009 Iranian presidential election against the disputed victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and in support of opposition candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi occurred in major cities in Iran and around the world starting June 13, 2009...
.
Texting in politics
Text messaging has had a major impact on the political world. American campaigns find that text messaging is a much easier, cheaper way of getting to the voters than the door-to-door approach. Mexico's president-elect Felipe Calderón launched millions of text messages in the days immediately preceding his narrow win over Andres Manuel Lopez Obradór. In January 2001, Joseph Estrada was forced to resign from the post of president of the Philippines. The popular campaign against him was widely reported to have been co-ordinated with SMS chain letters. A massive texting campaign was credited with boosting youth turnout in Spain's 2004 parliamentary elections. In 2008, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his Chief of Staff at the time became entangled in a sex scandal stemming from the exchange of over 14,000 text messages that eventually led to his forced resignation, conviction of perjury, and other charges.Text messaging has been used to turn down other political leaders. During the 2004 U.S. Democratic and Republican National Conventions, protesters used an SMS-based organizing tool called TXTmob to get to opponents. In the last day before the 2004 presidential elections in Romania, a message against Adrian Năstase
Adrian Nastase
Adrian Năstase is a Romanian politician who was the Prime Minister of Romania from December 2000 to December 2004.He competed as the Social Democratic Party candidate in the 2004 presidential election, but was defeated by centre-right Justice and Truth Alliance candidate Traian Băsescu.He was...
was largely circulated, thus breaking the laws that prohibited campaigning that day.
Text messaging has helped politics by promoting campaigns.
Furthermore, on January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada
Joseph Estrada
Joseph "Erap" Ejercito Estrada was the 13th President of the Philippines, serving from 1998 until 2001. Estrada was the first person in the Post-EDSA era to be elected both to the presidency and vice-presidency.Estrada gained popularity as a film actor, playing the lead role in over 100 films in...
of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob
Smart mob
A smart mob is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination. Parallels are made to,...
. More than one million Manila residents assembled at the site of the 1986 People Power peaceful demonstrations that has toppled the Marcos regime. These people have organized themselves and coordinated their actions through text messaging. They were able to bring down a government without having to use any weapons or violence. Through text messaging, their plans and ideas were communicated to others and successfully implemented. Also, this move encouraged the military to withdraw their support from the regime, and as a result, the Estrada government fell. People were able to converge and unite with the use of their cell phones. "The rapid assembly of the anti-Estrada crowd was a hallmark of early smart mob
Smart mob
A smart mob is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination. Parallels are made to,...
technology, and the millions of text messages exchanged by the demonstrators in 2001 was, by all accounts, a key to the crowds esprit de corps."
Medical concerns
The excessive use of the thumb for pressing keys on mobile devices has led to a high rate of a form of repetitive strain injuryRepetitive strain injury
Repetitive strain injury is an injury of the musculoskeletal and nervous systems that may be caused by...
termed "Blackberry thumb
BlackBerry thumb
BlackBerry thumb is a neologism that refers to a form of repetitive strain injury caused by the frequent use of the thumbs to press buttons on PDAs, smartphones, or other mobile devices...
". (Although this refers to strain developed on older Blackberry devices, which had a scroll wheel on the side of the phone.)
An inflammation of the tendons in the thumb caused by constant text-messaging is also called text-messager's thumb, or texting tenosynovitis
Tenosynovitis
Tenosynovitis is the inflammation of the fluid-filled sheath that surrounds a tendon. Symptoms of tenosynovitis include pain, swelling and difficulty moving the particular joint where the inflammation occurs. When the condition causes the finger to "stick" in a flexed position, this is called...
.
Texting has also been linked as a secondary source in numerous traffic collisions, in which police
Police
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...
investigations of mobile phone records have found that many drivers have lost control of their cars while attempting to send or retrieve a text message. Increasing cases of Internet addiction
Behavioral addiction
Behavioral addiction is a form of addiction which does not rely on drugs or alcohol. Increasingly referred to as process addiction or non-substance-related addiction ) behavioral addiction includes a compulsion to repeatedly engage in an action until said action causes serious negative consequences...
are now also being linked to text messaging, as mobile phones are now more likely to have e-mail and Web capabilities to complement the ability to text.
Texting etiquette
America's twentieth-century etiquette guru, Emily PostEmily Post
Emily Post was an American author famous for writing on etiquette.-Background:Post was born as Emily Price in Baltimore, Maryland, into privilege as the only daughter of architect Bruce Price and his wife Josephine Lee Price of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania...
, still has lessons regarding people living in the twenty-first century. At the website of The Emily Post Institute
The Emily Post Institute
The Emily Post Institute was created by etiquette author Emily Post in 1946. The organization, located in Burlington, Vermont, provides etiquette experts and advice to news outlets and other corporations. The authors at the Emily Post Institute write books and columns, conduct seminars and...
, the topic of texting has spurred several articles with the "do's and dont's" regarding the new form of communication. One example from the site is: "Keep your message brief. No one wants to have an entire conversation with you by texting when you could just call him or her instead."
Another example is: "Don't use all Caps. Typing a text message in all capital letters will appear as though you are shouting at the recipient, and should be avoided."
There are also generational differences in etiquette as noted in Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman's The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace. Younger Americans often do not consider it rude to answer their cell or begin texting in the middle of a face-to-face conversation with someone else, while older people, less used to the behavior and the accompanying lack of eye contact or attention, find this to be disruptive and ill-mannered.
With regard to texting in the workplace, Plantronics
Plantronics
Plantronics is an electronics company producing audio communications equipment for business and consumers. Its' products provide unified communications, mobile use, gaming and music...
studied how we communicate at work and found that 58% of US knowledge workers have increased the use of text messaging for work in the past five years. The same study found that 33% of knowledge workers felt text messaging was critical or very important to success and productivity at work.
Text message spam
In 2002, an increasing trend towards spammingMobile phone spam
Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. It is described as mobile spamming, SMS spam, text spam or m-spam....
mobile phone users through SMS prompted cellular-service carriers to take steps against the practice, before it became a widespread problem. No major spamming incidents involving SMS had been reported , but the existence of mobile phone spam has been noted by industry watchdogs including Consumer Reports
Consumer Reports
Consumer Reports is an American magazine published monthly by Consumers Union since 1936. It publishes reviews and comparisons of consumer products and services based on reporting and results from its in-house testing laboratory. It also publishes cleaning and general buying guides...
magazine and the Utility Consumers' Action Network (UCAN). In 2005, UCAN brought a case against Sprint for spamming its customers and charging $0.10 per text message. The case was settled in 2006 with Sprint agreeing not to send customers Sprint advertisements via SMS.
SMS expert Acision (foremerly LogicaCMG Telecoms) reported a new type of SMS malice at the end of 2006, noting the first instances of SMiShing (a cousin to e-mail phishing
Phishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
scams). In SMiShing, users receive SMS messages posing to be from a company, enticing users to phone premium-rate numbers or reply with personal information.
Pricing concerns
Concerns have been voiced over the excessive cost of off-plan text messaging in the United States. AT&TAT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
, along with most other service providers, charges texters 20 cents per message if they do not have a messaging plan or if they have exceeded their allotted number of texts. Given that an SMS message is at most 160 bytes in size, this cost scales to a cost of $1,310 per megabyte sent via text message. This is in sharp contrast with the price of unlimited data plans offered by the same carriers, which allow the transmission of hundreds of megabytes of data for monthly prices of about $15 to $45 in addition to a voice plan. As a comparison, a one-minute phone call uses up the same amount of network capacity as 600 text messages, meaning that if the same cost-per-traffic formula were applied to phone calls, cell phone calls would cost $120 per minute. With service providers gaining more customers and expanding their capacity, their overhead costs should be decreasing, not increasing.
Although major cellphone providers deny any collusion, fees for out-of-package text messages have increased, doubling from 10 to 20 cents in the United States between 2007 and 2008 alone. On July 16, 2009, Senate hearings were held to look into any breach of the Sherman Antitrust Act
Sherman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act requires the United States federal government to investigate and pursue trusts, companies, and organizations suspected of violating the Act. It was the first Federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies, and today still forms the basis for most antitrust litigation by...
.
Increasing competition
While text messaging is still a growing market, traditional SMS are becoming increasingly challenged by alternative messaging services which are available on smartphones with data connections. These services are much cheaper and offer more functionality like exchanging of multimedia content (e.g. photos, videos or audio notes) and group messaging. Especially in western countries some of these services attract more and more users.Security concerns
Consumer SMS should not be used for confidential communication. The contents of common SMS messages are known to the network operator's systems and personnel. Therefore, consumer SMS is not an appropriate technology for secure communications.To address this issue, many companies use an SMS gateway provider based on SS7 connectivity to route the messages. The advantage of this international termination model is the ability to route data directly through SS7, which gives the provider visibility of the complete path of the SMS. This means SMS messages can be sent directly to and from recipients without having to go through the SMS-C of other mobile operators. This approach reduces the number of mobile operators that handle the message; however, it should not be considered as an end-to-end secure communication, as the content of the message is exposed to the SMS gateway provider.
Failure rates without backward notification can be high between carriers (T-Mobile to Verizon is notorious in the US). International texting can be extremlely unreliable depending on the country of origin, destination and respective carriers.
| Consumer SMS | Business SMS |
|---|---|
| Unreliable | Timely delivery |
| Immeasurable | Measurable via delivery notifications |
| Subject to high levels of message loss and delay | No message loss, full transparency and security through end-to-end delivery |
| Insecure transmission routes | Viable for all types of mobile interaction: B2B, B2C, C2B, C2C |
| Viable for person-to-person communications only |
Records and competition
The Guinness Book of World Records has a world record for text messaging, currently held by Sonja Kristiansen of Norway. Ms. Kristiansen keyed in the official text message, as established by Guinness, in 37.28 seconds. The message is, "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality, they seldom attack a human." In 2005, the record was held by a 24-year-old Scottish man, Craig Crosbie, who completed the same message in 48 seconds, beating the previous time by 19 seconds.The Book of Alternative Records lists Chris Young of Salem, Oregon
Salem, Oregon
Salem is the capital of the U.S. state of Oregon, and the county seat of Marion County. It is located in the center of the Willamette Valley alongside the Willamette River, which runs north through the city. The river forms the boundary between Marion and Polk counties, and the city neighborhood...
, as the world-record holder for the fastest 160-character text message where the contents of the message are not provided ahead of time. His record of 62.3 seconds was set on May 23, 2007.
Elliot Nicholls of Dunedin, New Zealand, currently holds the world record for the fastest blindfolded text messaging. A record of a 160-letter text in 45 seconds while blindfolded was set on 17 November 2007, beating the old record of 1 minute 26 seconds set by an Italian in September 2006.
Ohio native Andrew Acklin is credited with the world record for most text messages sent or received in a single month, with 200,052. His accomplishments were first in the World Records Academy and later followed up by Ripley's Believe It Or Not 2010: Seeing Is Believing. He has been acknowledged by The Universal Records Database for the most text messages in a single month.
In January 2010, LG Electronics
LG Electronics
LG Electronics is a global electronics and telecommunications company headquartered in Yeouido, Seoul, South Korea. The company operates its business through five divisions: mobile communications, home entertainment, home appliance, air conditioning and business solution...
sponsored an international competition, the LG Mobile World Cup
LG Mobile World Cup
The LG Mobile World Cup was an international competition held on January 14, 2010 by LG Electronics in which participants competed using their texting speed and accuracy. It was held at Gotham Hall in New York City. Thirteen teams representing their countries competed for a total of $150,000 USD in...
, to determine the fastest pair of texters. The winners were a team from South Korea, Ha Mok-min and Bae Yeong-ho.
On April 6, 2011, SKH Apps released an iPhone app, iTextFast, to allow consumers to test their texting speed and practice the paragraph used by Guinness Book of World Records. The current best time listed on Game Center for that paragraph is 34.65 seconds.
Morse code
A few competitions have been held between expert Morse codeMorse code
Morse code is a method of transmitting textual information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment...
operators and expert SMS users. Several mobile phones have Morse code ring tones and alert messages. For example, many Nokia
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
mobile phones have an option to beep "S M S" in Morse code when it receives a short message. Some of these phones could also play the Nokia slogan "Connecting people" in Morse code as a message tone. There are third-party applications available for some mobile phones that allow Morse input for short messages.
See also
- Chat language
- Extended Messaging ServiceExtended Messaging ServiceXMS is a technology to allow Rich Text Formatting in SMS messages.The XMS message is a message with a custom SMS special format to enable a rich interface including a color for the text of the message, a background color for the message and a border and can contain smileys provided that both...
- Instant messagingInstant messagingInstant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
- List of mobile text entry technologies
- LOLLOLLOL is an acronym or abbreviation of "laughing out loud", "lots of luck", or "lots of love". In medical slang, it is used as an acronym for "little old lady", a reference to the novel House of God.LOL or Lol may also refer to:...
- MMSMultimedia Messaging ServiceMultimedia Messaging Service, or MMS, is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. It extends the core SMS capability that allowed exchange of text messages only up to 160 characters in length.The most popular use is to send photographs from...
- Mobile dial codeMobile dial codeA Mobile Dial Code is a phone number that allows the request and receipt of information directly to a mobile phone.A Mobile Dial Code combines a toll-free number, a web address and a short code into one simplified number. It is a 2-12 digit string of letters or numbers that is preceded by a...
- Operator messagingOperator messagingOperator Messaging is the term, similar to Text Messaging and Voice Messaging, applying to an answering service call center who focuses on one specific scripting style that has grown out of the alphanumeric pager history.-Early history:...
- SMSSMSSMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
- SMS languageSMS languageSMS language or textese is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, in particular the widespread SMS SMS language or textese (also known as txt-speak, txtese, chatspeak, txt, txtspk, txtk, txto, texting language, txt...
- Telegram
- Tironian notesTironian notesTironian notes is a system of shorthand said to have been invented by Cicero's scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro. Tiro's system consisted of about 4,000 signs, somewhat extended in classical times to 5,000 signs. In the European Medieval period, Tironian notes were taught in monasteries and the system...
, scribal abbreviationScribal abbreviationScribal abbreviations are the abbreviations used by ancient and mediæval scribes writing in Latin and, later, in Greek and Old Norse...
s and ligatures: Roman and medieval abbreviations used to save space on manuscripts and epigraphs
External links
- The London Text and MSN Dictionary- A text and mobile phone dictionary written by west London teenagers
- The CSCA, the U.S. registry for SMS short codes
- Stellenbosch University Research Report that includes Text Messaging facts.- Information and statistics on GSM & text messaging