#709 Added Text

Texting has taken over the interpersonal communications market. How ironic. We went to such great technological lengths to communicate by voice and now we’re reverting to the written word.
It’s as if we’re saying to Alexander Graham Bell, “Hey, thanks for the talky thing but, you know, we really like tapping out messages on this telegraph key. It’s slower and, um, more likely to lead to misunderstandings because most people can’t communicate subtle things like kidding and sarcasm with the written word. But hey, we learned these letters and this code and everything...”
Funny. Most people can say what they mean ten times faster than type what they mean. Not only that, talking people are not miserable spellers.
Email spelling is bad enough. Failure to capitalize words, inattention to spellcheck with homonyms, flipping diphthongs in words like trail and trial, spelling is a minefield waiting for a flamenco dancer.
Now there’s texting, where every digit counts, so we’re forced to use the number “4” for the word “for” and other spelling nonsense. Why? To save valuable text space and therefore money.
Which, to me, is the biggest telecommunications boondoggle since the days of the Ma Bell monopoly. Back in the old days if you added an extra phone in your house you had to pay extra. Not an extra line, an extra phone. It wasn’t like two people could be on two separate calls and using up extra phone line space. But they made you pay anyhow. As long as they could get away with it.
So tell me, why should you have to pay extra for texting? Texting uses less digital bits than talking. Compare 14 songs of audio data on a CD and a whole encyclopedia worth of written data.
It makes no sense. A texted message takes less time to send, uses less digital space, and frees up the bandwidth more quickly. Even texting teenagers are not prodigious writers, but some people will talk forever.
You’d think the bandwidth-strapped cell companies would give you a discount for texting.
So here’s the subtext. It’s an “added” feature. So the Ma Cells will gouge us.
As long as they can get way with it.
America, ya gotta love it.