Txt

October 17, 2008
English 1110
Essay #4 Final Draft

“txt”

A hammer is designed to whack things. It is against the nature of the tool not to hit things with it. If you were to hold a hammer in your hand, it would be hard not to pound the dickens out of something. Technology, in a similar way, has a bias in how it is to be used. The quality of communication is an effect of the intrinsic limitations of technology.

The telephone, invented in 1876, is a device that allows you to talk to another person over short or vast distances. You can hear the tones and inflections in the other person’s voice that show emotion. It is, though, a far cry from talking to someone in person, as you lose gestures, facial expressions, and especially the emotion in their eyes. The gap between a face-to-face meeting and mere telephone speech is a large one, and the reduction from voice to print is even greater.

The printed word is a medium that lacks emotion. Inflection is reduced to punctuation. Even something as silly as, “I dislike your shabby poodle,” can be read as either offensive or sarcastic. The emotional ambiguity on its own gives you two options. You can say things that are unambiguous, or you can ambiguously say things with their emotion defined by context and punctuation. Cell phone text messaging is biased towards the latter. Texting cannot carry emotion. Any emotion shown is a product of context, but in texting context is stripped away. You can only send 160 characters per message, using nine keys instead of 26, and punctuation is hard to do, requiring more characters and keystrokes. You certainly cannot write a philosophical treatise over text. No, you can’t even really say anything important, as emotion, context, and length are removed. Both quality and quantity are lacking.

On the other hand, texting does positively allow us to send tiny bytes of knowledge to people without the need or bother of a phone call. You can send someone information who you know is in a meeting, or in a show. You can also use it if you need to say something when you can’t make noise. Texting is not without its uses, but the limitation of the tool defines what we can say with it. When people try to communicate something serious in a text message, it more often than not results in confusion and mixed messages. The limited capabilities of texting contribute to this negative result. When you try to say more than a medium is designed to communicate, your original meaning gets lost.

Proverbs 16:22 says, "A wise man’s heart guides his mouth." You are responsible not only for what you say but also how you say it. It is important to choose a way of communicating that is capable of expressing what you want to communicate. You must be wise in how you let the medium of communication affect your message.

L8er.