Textual Intercourse

Sometimes we are blinded by the ubiquity of something to its actual greatness. This means that in our day-to-day life, you and I overlook many reasons to be cheerful. I have been able to appreciate this on a sort of meta level in writing on this theme. The TV show 'Room 101' involved celebrities listing items they hated which were then banished to the eponymous 'Room 101', or not, depending on the arbitration of the host. One of the initial questions on 'Room 101' usually concerned how easy it was for the celeb. to come up with things they hated. The response was normally that it was hard at first, but once you began to notice things that irked you, a deluge of minor annoyances suddenly became apparent in your daily existence. A smorgasbord of pique.

Well for me, the reverse is true (I was here intending to come up with some witty reversal of Room 101, but the stupid numbers are palindromic). In writing this, I have opened up my brainbox to a myriad of pleasant surprises, enjoyable realisations and delight. The subject of this post is one of those. It beeped and vibrated its way into my consciousness this very morning.

Text messaging.

Text messaging is very rarely referenced in our culture, aside from snotty pieces about how text speak is ruining our language. Do excuse my coarseness, but that is bullshit. In the 'olden days' before computers, people used to write in shorthand (often, in fact, these very same curmudgeonly journalists), and their brains weren't reduced to an irredeemable mush, and society hasn't caved in on itself. Also, text messaging has made instant communication avaliable to all, regardless of age, wealth etc. Mass-communication means people become more comfortable and ultimately more confident with language and rhetoric. And that's generally regarded as a good thing.

Also, let's not forget the brilliance of the process of sending and receiving a text. Firstly, whoever invented a means of enabling a twenty-six letter alphabet to be compacted onto nine keys is a bloody genius. What else can that guy do? How efficient must his day-to-day life be?! Secondly, never, ever forget when you press 'send', a text message becomes bits of electricity that wirelessly fly to space. Wirelessly. To space. When they get to space, they bounce off the satellite which is somehow exactly in the right place. They then somehow know where the intended recipient is, and put the information in their phone, even if it is hidden in your pocket or at the bottom of a really full bag. This takes less than five seconds. If you're underground, or somewhere without signal, don't fret, your message will just chillout somewhere in the ether until you're good and ready to receive it.

Now tell me text messaging is not brilliant.

Such is the brilliance of text messaging that it has pervaded totally our society. Now all horror/ thriller films have to write in a reason why the hero and heroin in peril can't text for help. "Oh shit Bobby-Joe, my battery just died." "Oh Peggy-Sue, I told ya ta charge it last night at the motel. Now let's just run around in those woods where all those people were murdered."

[As a fun side bit of cheerfulness, imagine all the films/plays/books that would have fundamentally different plots if they had access to text messages. "Jesus, gt out of the Grdn f Gthsmne, Judas n th Phrisees r comin 2 arrst u."]

Ultimately, text messages are most pleasing at a human level. By condensing conversation into 160 characters, it enables a soupcon, a vignette of information, at its most bullshit-free level to be sent. If you want to got to the cinema with a mate, you send "Fancy going to the cinema tonight mate?". It forces humans to connect with what words are, to deploy them strategically as a valuable commodity. It was said of Pitt the Younger that his rhetoric was the greatest of all time, because as a child he was forced to read aloud Greek or Latin works in English, translating as he spoke. Debating opponents claimed that he was always able to select the right word. This is a skill that also comes from text messaging, something that we should encourage. Rather than forshadowing the decline of our society, it just may be a signal of better things to come.

And that, my m8s, is why I think that text messaging is a rsn 2 b chrfl.