SMS and the txt generation
Short Message Service, better known as SMS, happened more or less by accident. To not have predicted its impact must have been one of the major marketing errors of the nineteenth century. The very first SMS message was made in December 1992 and the message read “Merry Christmas”.
SMS was designed to be used by the networks to send messages to their customers, and was not intended for direct communication between subscribers. It makes use of a part of the bandwidth designed for system control during times when it is not in use, thus there is no cost to the network company.
The maximum message size is limited to 140 bytes, which equates to 160 characters. In order to overcome this limitation long SMS was introduced which broke log messages down into 140 byte blocks, transmitted them separately, and then recombined them. This was extended to EMS (Enhanced Messaging Service) which could include images and music.
Rapidly SMS became a cult thing for the emergent generation. It was a way in which the young could communicate with the young using a language, that they themselves invented. What could be more perfect than that? Used to playing computer games, they enhanced their dextrous skills to input messages using only their thumbs and typing at startling speeds. There was no need for the grammatical rules that they learned at school, no need for punctuation, no need for vowels either; in fact the whole thing about texting was that it was anarchistic. A whole new vocabulary was invented constructed entirely of consonants, pictograms and single letter representations of whole words.
Although the invention of texting was a collective act of creative genius, it was criticised intensely by the older generation which it had left behind. Accused of bringing havoc to the English language it was compared to graffiti and its users were depicted as vandals. Of course this hysteria declined over time, and numerous historians pointed out that similar abbreviations had been used for centuries without destroying the language.
With modern phones having applications such as predictive text and being equipped with full QWERTY keyboards along with the increasing popularity of SMS amongst the general population, the popularity of abbreviated text messages has declined to some extent. It remains, however, a social phenomenon that was not foreseen.