| Mobile phones and the short-text messaging service (SMS or “text”) in particular
are new social phenomena, much marvelled at and much commented upon (See
Brown et al, 2002; Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004). This success is said to be
because mobiles allow new levels of micromanagement in an age of fraught and
tight deadlines (Plant, 2002), or because they allow communities to create and
sustain their own language networks (Sandor, 2003: 71-81); but for some
commentators, mobiles are making teenagers inarticulate (Gergen, 2003, pp227-
41); they are a distraction from true engagement with people at a face to face level
(Katz, 2003, pp21-33), and, along with other technologies, they are leading to a
dissolution of the ‘civic’ society (cf Sennet. For a sample of papers on these topics
see: Nyiri, 2003).
What is certain is that mobile communication, whether it be fully duplex telephony
or SMS traffic, is at once ‘merely’ people communicating, undertaking the prosaic
activity of chit-chat within the frame of a particular medium, yet at the same time,
many other things too: talking is after all not always merely chit-chat: it is made up
of very many different goals, functions, and content. Indeed one might argue that
what one finds when one looks at texting is a microcosm of society at large, as
Harvey Sack’s taught us long ago about everyday conversations (Sacks, 1992).
Insofar as mobile communication is thus a reflection of the society of which it is
part and a technology helping society evolve, it is a wonderful topic for inquiry,
both technological and social. It is, also, an opportunity to do good research and to
do bad. For example, the sociological research on texting (certainly what has been
published in the past four or five years), attests not only to the insights that
sociological explorations can provide but also to the limits of sociology when it is
done poorly. To capture and explore just how society is writ large in these little
alphanumeric messages known as texts requires a sensitivity as well as a delicacy of
understanding that is not always present. It is all too easy for the precise meaning of
a text message to become obscured in the sociological efforts to prise open society;
and on the other hand in focusing on the meaning, the sociological analysis can
result in society itself disappearing from view (See Harper & Gosset, forthcoming). |
