The prevalence of text message usage has increased dramatically in the last decade.
I’m not sure if you noticed but there are a lot of people using cell phones these days. In fact, today’s cell phone is probably inaccurately named. Cell phones do still make phone calls of course but they are increasingly becoming more like portable computers than merely phones. This dramatically improved functionality of cell phones has not necessarily made texting more prevalent per se but it has opened the door to less costly plans and more text-friendly telephones. As a result, the prevalence of text message usage has increased dramatically in the last decade.
What started as a novelty nearly 20 years ago has since grown into somewhat of a cultural fixture. With all of the texting lingo, it is easy to understand why there is debate about whether or not texting is harming today’s children. It seems a little unlikely that the new linguistic patterns found in texting is negatively impacting today’s youth but one has to wonder: What exactly are kids saying? More directly, what types of things are today’s youth using text messages for?
Who Are They
Crispin Thurlow and Alex Brown of the University of Washington-Department of Communication
What They Did
Thurlow and Brown utilized 159 first year college students from Cardiff University (Wales, UK) and analyzed 544 individual text messages for 1.) Message Length 2.) Main linguistic content, such as actual text (like this), or emoticons ( :-p ), and abbreviations (Laymanpsych is Gr8).
What They Found
As is perhaps expected, Thurlow’s findings seem to indicate that users are often brief. The technology limits the length of the messages to (typically) 160 characters, most users used around 65 characters (though there was a lot of variation; some used much more, some used less). This size limit seems to explain the need for abbreviations; the findings reveal that of the 544 examples, there were 1401 abbreviations (or about 3 per message). Interestingly, this only accounts for roughly 20% of the content.
Each message was then categorized by content (of the 544 examples, 121 were eligible for categorization) into one of eight categories as follows:
*Informational-Practical: Exchanges of practical details or requests (14%)
*Informational-Relational: Exchanges for requests or personal favors (8%)
*Practical Arrangement: Plans to meet (15%)
*Social Arrangement: Plans for recreational meetings (9%)
* Salutary: Greetings. Often very brief and non-specific (17%)
*Friendship Maintenance: Apologies, support, thanks, etc. (23%)
*Romantic: Maintenance of romantic relationships (9%)
*Sexual: Explicitly sexual overtones. (3%)
*Chain Messages: Long messages passed from user to user (2%)
Separating these eight categories into two groups, “low-intimacy, high transactional” and “High intimacy, high relational”, further reveals that the majority of text messages were to set up or maintain relationships (roughly 61%).
Other themes of note were a large level of humor and general “joy” as well as what Thurlow has described as “Hyper-coordination” in which users updated others with information about looming plans. For example: M25 “C u in 5 min x” or M27 “Where r u? We r by the bar at the back on the left”. Lastly, texts were frequently used to have separate personal conversations between individuals while within a larger group. Many, for example, were texts to fellow classmates about the lecture at hand, or about individuals within the group.
What does it all mean?
The study at hand is rather simplistic and on a certain level, one could argue, somewhat foreseeable. This study seems to make it clear that text messaging has become an imperative communication tool for younger individuals. In the context of a hyper-active world in which people are often running in many directions at once, text messaging appears to be a viable way for people to not just remain in touch with each other but actually increase their social productivity. Although one could argue that the content of these messages is an abomination to the English language, it’s also a possibility that there is simply a new communication paradigm that has formed. In areas where speed is not an overly important aspect of the interaction, whether it’s on a term paper or even on Facebook, language appears to remain in tact.
Perhaps for a new form of communication (text messaging), for it to be as efficient as possible for its intended use, requires a new language of its own. It seems likely that English remains safe and text messaging will continue to facilitate an ever-busy society that still has a strong urge to remain in touch.
Further Reading
Generation Txt? The sociolinguistics of young people’s text-messaging (link to article)
The Psychology of Twitter, Facebook, and Other Social Networking Devices