Texting

Look past the stereotype of frivolous teenage gossip. You’ll see a powerful and essential technology used for everything from banking to shopping, from writing novels to voting.

More than 4.5 billion people have access to Short Message Service (SMS), thanks to the availability of cell phones and the extraordinary expansion of cell towers, one of history’s largest infrastructure projects. Billions in the developing world who never had telephones, or even reliable mail, are now connected 24/7.

A billion and a half people in the developing world have phones but no bank account. Banking by text can provide a financial lifeline.

More than 25 percent of Kenya’s GDP (the value of all its goods and services) now passes through M-PESA, a text-based payment service that doesn’t even require a sophisticated smartphone.

Texting spreads news fast and efficiently. Emergency services use it for tornado warnings, while “citizen reporters” text eyewitness reports—as during the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.

It’s also an inexpensive organizing tool. In 2001, texting helped topple an unpopular Philippines regime. Yet during Kenya’s disputed 2008 election, people used texts to incite violence.

Tiny phone keyboards spawned a new way to type.

People long derided thumb typing, but it has become a discreet medium in meetings and classrooms. It’s easy to do one-handed while eating, walking...even on the toilet.

Being in constant touch connects us to a larger community. Yet it can also distract from being fully present in our own lives.

BRB. OMG. HMU. Not quite Shakespearean, perhaps. But is it OK to abbrevi8?

Languages evolve in response to new technologies. Telegraphy’s terse “SOS” became a universal cry for help. Texting has spread LOL for “laugh out loud”.

Is texting’s brevity bastardizing language? Or just high-tech haiku?

Phone calls connect people in real time…but only if the signal is strong and the person answers. Texting offers similar immediacy—with added reliability.

Texts can arrive almost instantly. But when connections are bad or the recipient’s phone is off, they texts “wait” on a server until they can be reliably delivered. Texts also tend to get noticed, not lost in the noise like email. Both factors fueled texting’s popularity.

Texting takes advantage of a narrow signaling channel that the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) phone networks use to coordinate various components.

The channel’s limited capacity kept Short Message Service (SMS) to 160 characters. But it brought the advantage of using bandwidth not otherwise in demand. So companies could add SMS without jeopardizing their core services and cutting into the main data or voice channels.

Smartphones, such as iPhones or Android, offer email and full Web web access. “Dumbphones,” which preceded them, use texting instead of email, and offer services over the phone company’s private network rather than the open internet.

Internet-enabled smartphones are gradually replacing dumbphones. Yet both can text, leaving Short Message Service (SMS) the only universal mobile message medium.

Cell phones were developed as telephones. Developers expected customers mostly to talk, though some might use the phones as mobile computer modems.

A few farsighted engineers managed to get texting included in the general the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard for digital mobile phones. They succeeded in part because it didn’t use extra bandwidth. Carriers conceded that texting might be mildly useful for sending announcements to customers.

Texting between customers started out free. Telephone companies didn’t envision it as a popular product.

Young people in Scandinavia and elsewhere were probably were first to text as an alternative to costly calling. Since companies didn’t track texting, early adopters are hard to document. Once texting became popular, fees followed.

Texting’s low hardware cost (even the cheapest phones can text) propelled its growth. Today, texting is big business, generating $115 billion globally in 2014.

Unlike the internet’s ad-driven business model, texting follows the traditional telephone industry approach: fee for service. As smartphones spread, bringing full internet connectivity, which model will prevail?