Texting Study: Frequent Texting Makes You Shallow, Says University Of Winnipeg

[T]here was a guy named Friedhelm Hillebrand, who was part of the committee organizing how the mobile telephone system would work. And in the '80s, there was really very limited bandwidth. So, they were trying to figure out how to do this and use the least amount of data and space on the system as possible. So, he sat down at a typewriter and banged out sentences and started counting up the number of characters in the sentence. And he just decided that 160 characters was enough to write a sentence or ask a question. And we've been living with that limit ever since.

Twitter was inspired by SMS and we continue to embrace this simple but ubiquitous technology. In fact, Twitter's 140-character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you're using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device.

In 2002, the monthly supplement of the Helsinki-based newspaper Helsingin Sanomat began in earnest to investigate the history of this invention. Among those interviewed was Matti Makkonen, a graduate engineer born in Suomussalmi in 1952, who had years of experience in the creation of telephone technical standards. He described the process of how work on the innovation had progressed, but he named no names for the source of the concept. Many interviews later, it began to dawn on the journalist, where the idea had come from. It was Makkonen himself who, a bit reluctantly, admitted to being the father of SMS.

When disaster strikes, SMS has a major advantage over cellular voice calls and wireless e-mail devices. Text messages do not rely on voice channels for transmission, and they don't piggyback on enterprise e-mail servers. Instead, SMS messages travel as small packets of data on a wireless carrier's control channel, the same portion of the spectrum that keeps a cellular network apprised of a particular phone's location and status.Because SMS messages are isolated in the control channel and are often unfazed by heavy traffic or adverse conditions that can overwhelm wireless networks, text messages can get through when most other methods of communication fail.

...[B]ecause SMS is often reliable in the wake of disasters when other communications fail, officials at agencies or departments not on the front lines of disaster recovery may find themselves and their employees turning to text messaging, should worst-case scenarios materialize.

Imagine you need to get a small amount of money to your sister who lives in a village that's ten hours drive away. The easiest way for you to do that is to buy some airtime, but instead of topping up your own prepaid mobile service you top up hers. For a small fee, she can now go and cash out this airtime with an agent that sells airtime.

Sometimes it is more convenient to use the English term, but often it is the aesthetically preferred term--the cooler expression. Texters in all eleven languages that Crystal lists use "lol," "u," "brb," and "gr8," all English-based shorthands. The Dutch use "2m" to mean "tomorrow"; the French have been known to use "now," which is a lot easier to type than "maintenant." And there is what is known as "code-mixing," in which two languages--one of them invariably English--are conflated in a single expression. Germans write "mbsseg" to mean "mail back so schnell es geht" ("as fast as you can"). So texting has probably done some damage to the planet's cultural ecology, to lingo-diversity. People are better able to communicate across national borders, but at some cost to variation.