“A Misnomer of Sizeable Proportions”: SMS and Oral Tradition

In The Pathways Project, John Miles Foley (2011–) discusses briefly the social role of SMS (Short Message Service), suggesting that “even so-called text messaging, a misnomer of sizeable proportions given that the activity really amounts to a long-distance emergent communication enacted virtually, knits people together into interactive groups and keeps them connected and ‘present’ to one another.”¹ In this essay, I propose a merger of current research on text messaging and the study of oral traditions in order to shed light on the relationship between this new mode of communication and the workings of consciousness being transformed by the eAgora. Focusing first on the limitations of text messaging as a medium that unexpectedly encouraged language innovation, we can explore how text messaging language merges effective communicative practices from both oral and written technologies in order to generate more efficient communication within a newly-limited, writing-based technology. Moreover, in addition to its efficiency, the kind of linguistic play found in text messaging can be viewed as a source of pleasure for those who engage in texting (“texters”). Thus, by employing the discourse of orality and literacy, we can explain how text messaging, while impossible to imagine without the myriad writing technologies mastered before it, actually encourages its literacy-obsessed users to practice communicative techniques more often found within oral cultures, or more precisely, communicative techniques found in cultures in the incipient stages of literacy. Such cultures are ripe for language innovation precisely because they have begun to record knowledge but have not yet standardized the recording procedure. Coincident with a perspective that sees text messaging as bridging a consciousness gap between oral and literate cultures, then, is the recognition that close study of the ways in which text messaging reworks language could lead to fruitful discoveries about the most current ways in which Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) directs human life toward ever-emerging horizons of consciousness.

When David Crystal (2008) hyperbolized the emergence of text messaging in the following passage, this form of communication was already a well-developed medium. Nevertheless, his humorous figuring of text messaging’s inception, while not quite accurate, highlights precisely the form’s limits that made it such an unlikely competitor in the tightly-wound market of twenty-first-century technologies (173–74):

I have this great idea. A new way of person-to-person communication, using your phone. The users won’t have a familiar keyboard. Their fingers will have trouble finding the keys. They will be able to send messages, but with no more than 160 characters at a time. The writing on the screens will be very small and difficult to read, especially if you have a visual handicap. The messages will arrive at any time, interrupting your daily routine or your sleep. Oh, and every now and again you won’t be able to send or receive anything because your battery will run out. Please invest in it?

SMS was originally intended as a way for mobile providers to share alerts and other service-oriented information with their networks of users. It was conceived, then, as a method of business communication, and it was imagined not as a back-and-forth process (users would not reply to the messages received from their provider) but rather as an end-to-end form of communication. In a nutshell, the idea was never to create dialogue (Faulkner and Culwin 2005:143; Thompson and Cupples 2008:143). Additionally, there were many impediments to the popularization of text messaging. For instance, during the first few years it was practiced, users could not send messages to other users outside of their network. Nor could messages be linked in order to send more than the restrictive 160 characters per text. And, of course, the keypads, which were designed with the traditional telephone in mind, required from one to four presses on a single key to produce the correct letter (Faulkner and Culwin 2005:167). Although these shortcomings have been mitigated by improvements to the networks through which messages are sent and by revisions to the keypad that made it resemble a computer keyboard...