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The most personal communication:
Last semester in my Interaction and Visual Interface Design course our professor, Shelley Evenson, made a remark about text messaging that’s stuck with me ever since. She told us, “I think that text messaging is the most personal form of communication.” What? Texting? You mean when my phone makes a noise and I read a message that says “hey wut r u up 2 2nite?”

Obviously I was a bit skeptical of this notion at first (and that’s an understatement), but recently I’m becoming convinced that it may indeed be the case. Since then, I’ve become more and more invested into texting, and I don’t know how I could argue against it. Think about it: for those social communities who embrace texting as a legitimate form of communication, there’s evolved an expectation that when you send somebody a text, they either respond to you immediately, or the moment they see that they have a message. My personal experience, for one, can confirm this fact, as I’ve lost my phone and been confronted on gchat with, “way to answer your texts, dick!”

Lately it seems that there’s almost no time, no place where people don’t have cell phone access, or can’t immediately respond to a text. Excluding participation in athletic events that make carrying a cell phone difficult, I can’t think of many situations where one wouldn’t be reachable by text. Unlike phone calls there is no texting taboo: movies, class, weird hours of the day - all are times where we are traditionally unavailable by phone or instant messenger, but these restrictions are thrown out the window as it becomes socially acceptable to text friends anytime, anywhere.

Empowering a generation:
Around the same time that semester, in my Issues in Multimedia Authoring course, Dr. Robert Cavalier recommended to me Howard Rheingold’s book Smart Mobs after I expressed interest in exploring the role of technology in social contexts. (Just for kicks, here’s a picture of the book taken on my cell phone and then grabbed from my mobile uploads album on Facebook.)

I’ve finally actually been able to start reading the book, and even in the first chapter, it seems that text messaging as the most personal form of communication be considered an understatement. As Rheingold states just four pages in, concerning Japanese teenagers:

[Anthropologist Mizuko] Ito believes that mobile phones triggered an intergenerational power shift in Japan because they freed youth from “the tyranny of the landline shared by inquisitive family members, creating a space for private communication and an agency that alters possibilities for social interaction.”

Rheingold further goes on to discuss how the ever-present contact with peers through texting almost reshapes the reality of a home formerly dominated by parents; intimacy has been localized and made portable. Now, I can only think of reasons to support the idea that text messaging is the most personal form of communication, and I’d say that even this one simple example in <em>Smart Mobs</em> really starts to show the power of texting. Also, I’m sure there will be more exciting stuff to come as I get further along in the book.