Just Text Me: The Mutually Shaped Story of the Short Messaging Service (SMS)

Abstract

While text messaging provides excellent benefits – including social connectivity and a platform for immediate, direct exchanges – it also raises controversial concerns. Texting while driving, dining, and socializing are now all common place, and yet often frowned upon. Through an analysis of various texts, including scholarly research, news articles, and web resources, this article considers how critical attitudes are towards the short message service (SMS), despite the large social influence in its rising adoption. This text argues that mobile technology and its texters shape each others' development in ways far less one-sided than usually depicted. For instance, the more users texted, the better phone keyboards became; the more texts users were allowed to send, the more they wrote. Awareness of this bidirectional, mutually shaping social process will hopefully lead to more effective double-pronged solutions to future tech-related social controversies - ones that may only start with the ambiguity of texting etiquette.