texting

Text messaging is extremely prevalent in today’s society and has impacted life for the current generation in a multitude of ways. The impact of texting can be hard to quantitatively determine, however it is contributing to an ongoing evolution in the way that humans communicate with each other via its effects on written language, grammar, and what purpose cell phones serve. This paper will show how texting is contributing to societal norms, a language shift and the sociological impact among youth in America and some of the reasons the changes are occurring.

Texting celebrated its 20th birthday on December 3 2012. This makes text messaging over 20 years old, though most people would be surprised to know this. Texting was conceived by Friedhelm Hillebrand in Germany after writing out a series of random messages and counting the characters that each message contained. He discovered that each message contained around 160 characters, which would go on to become a long time standard for the length of a text message. Hillebrand made his discovery in 1984, but the first message would be sent almost 10 years later on December 3, 1992. It simply said “Merry Christmas” and the recipient had no way to respond because their phone was incapable of sending a text back. The early versions of texts were sent by a system known as the Short Messaging Service and would not receive the moniker of “text” until Nokia would release a cell phone capable of sending and receiving texts in 1993. (Gayomali 2012)

Texting was very limited at first by several factors that kept it from catching on. One of the limiting factors was that in order to send a text message, users had to be on the same mobile network, which severely limited the number of people one co...

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...e them on the pros and cons of such dependence. Illiteracy is a serious issue that must be improved upon if teenagers are to turn in to responsible adults capable of being taken seriously by their older peers. Further teenagers must be made aware that while they may feel that Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are private, they are not and anything they type can be seen and used against them. Lastly teenagers should learn an emphasis on genuine connections with others that will lead to deep meaningful friendships and relationships. These are precious and important things that are being devalued by the cell phone culture, which has been largely assisted by text messaging. In order to combat these things steps must be taken to broaden the youth culture’s horizons and bring them back to the real world so to speak where people matter more than a number.