Several friends and relatives like to get text messages. They respond to them more often and more immediately than to emails. I imagine phones tend to make a different alerting sound for texts than for emails. I was recently told that a friend often has her phone set to silent. Once a phone is set to silent, it is easy to forget it is on that setting. No wonder nobody is calling!
"Among other data Hiya found, related to incoming call pick-up rates
52% of all calls received are answered
70% of calling numbers that are "saved in contacts" are answered
53% of calls identified with a business name are answered
24% of unidentified calls are answered
9% of calls identified as spam are answered"
https://bgr.com/2019/01/29/smartphone-usage-statistics-new-data/
Today, a friend and I exchanged 25 text messages in about an hour. (I use my computer and keyboard and Google Voice to text.) I wondered how the immediacy and the length of messages back and forth relate to the honesty, the self-revelation and even the benefit of texts. It seems to me that answering rather quickly and without too much elaboration might tend to answers that are more accurate and unadorned.
I have gotten some surprising long text messages on occasion. I guess there are many programs, apps and services that support texting and I suppose that more recently built ones allow longer messages. I read that some services mechanically break overly long messages into several shorter ones.
I like two TED talks about texting, one by the linguist Dr. John McWhorter and one by Nancy Lublin
McWhorter:
We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. What do I mean by that?
Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. That's what we're probably genetically specified for. That's how we use language most. Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m. That's how much of a latterly thing writing is. So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice.
I recommend looking at Nancy Lublin's TED talk or using the link to read the transcript of what she says. She gave me a new respect for texts and interest in them. Just reading that,for instance, texts have 100% opening record, that unlike email, you don't get a text message without seeing what it says, makes me feel that it is understandable that texts are a modified form of communication and matter in their own right.
