The Text Message Turned 20

Hi all.  It's been awhile, hasn't it?  Looks like November 18th was the last time I checked in with you.  Naturally, the end of the semester is getting in the way, but I'm happy to have a moment now to share about an article I stumbled upon earlier today.  We all need to take breaks, right?

Apparently, it has been exactly 20 years and two days (I'm late on the uptake, apparently) since the first ever text message was sent: On December 3rd, 1992, an engineer sent the message "Merry Christmas." to an executive.  Isn't it crazy that a lot of you probably have at least one good friend who's younger than the text message?  According to CNN.com, 6 billion small message service messages (like texts) are sent in the United States everyday.  Among teenagers, texting is the most common form of communication, as 75% of teenagers text, sending an average of 60 texts per day.  And, as a fun aside, "women are twice as likely to use emoticons in a text message than men, but men use a wider variety of emoticons, according to a recent study by Rice University." (CNN.com)

I can barely remember when texts were irrelevant, and people were still using phone calls to communicate.  I actually remember an instance when I was in middle school (right around '99-'00) when I was attempting to flirt with a girl, perhaps "ask her out", and I was forced to call her at her house to talk to her, because she had yet to get on this new thing called "instant messaging" that all of us kids were adapting.  I was quite the nervous wreck and was a fail during that phone call.  The conversation didn't last long.

Beyond flirting, texting and messaging has made life a little easier.  Autocorrect fails aside, using text to communicate rather than voice allows us more time to consider our responses to our friends.  If you're unsure about whether your friend can pick up the phone right now or not, you send them a text, assuming that they're more likely to see it than to check their voicemail.  Simple, convenient, and quick; this is why we're glad that texting exists.

So yes, it's been two days since its 20th birthday, but let's celebrate the text and all that it has brought into our lives.

My finals are coming, but hopefully I'll be back soon.  Til then, enjoy life!