According to cultural critic Umberto Eco (2002), we live in an age where the diminutive, the brief and the simple are highly prized in communication; if this is the case, then there's little doubt that text-messaging embodies this zeitgeist.
Like many earlier communication technologies, however, the mobile phone has come to evoke and/or embody a range of projected fears and hopes (cf. Turkle, 1995).
[Text-]messages often bear more resemblance to code than to standard language. A text filled with code language expressions is not necessarily accessible to an outsider. The unique writing style provides opportunities for creativity. (Kasesniemi & Rautiainen, 2002: 183 - emphasis ours).
we believe that humour helps to fulfil the generally phatic (cf. Malinowski, 1923) function of text-messaging by which an almost steady flow of banter is used in order to maintain an atmosphere of intimacy and perpetual social contact. In this sense, text-messaging is small-talk par excellence - none of which is to say that it is either peripheral or unimportant (see Coupland, 2000).
and yes, since my last post i did get a text joke about mark speight's suicide.. and i laughed, im a bad person;
"Police are investigating the bigger picture of Mark Speight's death. It was sent in by 11 year old Susie from Reading."
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