SMS: What's in a Message?

P.J. Worsfold, 10/31/2007

Contents

According to technology lore, the first Short Message Service (SMS) communication occurred on December 3 1992, when Neil Papworth, an engineer working for the English communications giant, Vodafone, wished his colleagues a "MERRY CHRISTMAS" (BBC 2002). By June 2000, SMS users around the globe were sending more than 12.2 million messages a month and in June 2007, monthly SMS traffic surpassed 28.8 billion messages (CTIA 2007). With the world's SMS users on pace to send about 2.8 trillion messages this year, the total revenue that SMS traffic will generate in 2007 is projected to be in excess of $100 billion. Today, there are 3 billion SMS-enabled mobile phones in the world; giving the SMS a reach nearly three times greater than that of PC-based internet (Ahonen Oct 2007).

The success and rapid adoption of SMS technology is staggering and yet within both academic circles and the greater public debate, comparatively little discussion has occurred on the social implications of this new medium. For instance, Reid and Reid observe, "little is known about the psychological impact of texting on social interaction amongst regular users" (Reid 2). From the academic side, such a paucity of published research is due in part to the fact that, until recently, the mobile communications discourse has tended to focus on mobile communications as a whole, rather considering voice and text-based communication as separate fields of study. However, with regard to the broader public discussion, this lack of investigation and debate seems indicative of a commonly held outlook on SMS, which dismisses it as a medium limited to the cost-conscious twitterings of teenagers.

In 1964, McLuhan argued, "it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium" (McLuhan 9). Today, our communications media wields more influence on us than ever before and yet we continue to be afflicted by the same blindness that McLuhan observed over 40 years ago. Like the never-ending quest to link television's portrayal of violence and sexuality with all of society's off-screen ailments, discussion on SMS is fixated on how its linguistic abbreviations, intellectual banality and lacking parental supervision will lead its users toward mindlessness and moral decay. When popular attention does manage to look beyond a medium's content, it inevitably heads in the direction of obsessive behaviour and addiction. First, the internet was going to make hermits of us all, now SMS threatens to turn its users into hyper-socialites, crippled by Attention Deficit and Repetitive Stress disorders. Not only are we blinded by our communications media, according to some estimates, our technology, like some alien force, holds in its grasp our individual will.

Further obfuscating our understanding of media and technology is the fact that, as we become a more technologically saturated and technologically dependent society, we increasingly exhibit a propensity to view the various components of our media system as products, rather than as tools. While in less technologically prolific times, the gradual introduction of new communications media, allowed us time to understand them and put them to use, today's technological bombardment seems to have society on its heels. Too often, rather than utilizing technology to achieve our ambitions, individual relationships with technology are passive and mired in an array of ever-changing megapixels, processor speeds, transfer rates, form factors, screen resolutions and satellite streams.

Technology has become a commodity and thus, our experience with it is often hollow; we know that we need technology, but we are not sure what purpose it will serve. As it advances and as one component is replaced by another, technology becomes an act of acquisition and we quickly lose sight of a particular medium's intended application and potential. Given the fleeting experience with technology that these circumstances engender, it is not surprising that society is reticent to take responsibility for its technology.

My intent with these admittedly generalized opening paragraphs is not to belittle important issues and social concerns. Rather, it is my contention that a process of sound critical thinking is often missing from technological discourse. This lack of balanced perspective creates a reactive understanding of communications technology, which is founded on anxiety and isolated issues and which ignores user motivations and long-term implications. A society's relationship with technology is both indicative of its present condition and predictive of its future development. However, in order to benefit from the insights that understanding such a relationship offers, we must actively engage technology and achieve a balanced understanding of our communications media, which looks beyond obvious characteristics and immediate uses.

SMS technology is both socially and technologically emblematic of the web-enabled era and sufficiently distinguishable from other communications media that it can be discussed on its own. Thus, SMS serves as an ideal vehicle for the exploration of the information that avails itself within the realms of informed technological understanding. In this discussion, I will engage and analyze many aspects of SMS; in the language of McLuhan, I will interpret the message of the medium. As I will demonstrate throughout this paper, I have arrived at the conclusion that SMS, with its mass appeal, simplicity and traceability, offers an illustration of the way we define ourselves and socialize with others that no other medium can provide. In simple terms, it is my contention that SMS marks a reassertion of individual primacy in the communications process, which stands as the antithesis to the homogenous and oligarchic character of traditional broadcast era mass media. The remainder of this discussion will offer a technical, social, and linguistic analysis of SMS and an exploration of the conclusions that I have drawn from this process.

With so many important and interdependent facts and conclusions, structuring this discussion has proven to be a challenging process. Nonetheless, this paper will begin with an overview of the SMS's functionality and technical infrastructure. This will be followed by a brief historical look at SMS's adoption around the world; throughout this section, I will discuss various social, technical, and economic factors that affected the medium's success. Next, I will offer an analysis of the SMS's use and potential in the developing world. Following this process, I will switch my attention to the developed world and look at who uses SMS, the medium's appeal, and the purposes that it serves. Maintaining focus on the developed world, I will conclude this discussion by addressing some common criticisms of SMS .

Before continuing with this discussion, I must introduce the results of the field research that I performed in September 2007 in preparation for this discussion. Table 1 offers background information of this process and I will refer to my findings throughout this paper. The survey that I designed to perform my field research as well as detailed charts illustrating my findings can be seen in this paper's appendix. It should be noted that the results of my field research are somewhat skewed by the fact that the recipients of the survey were various friends and family who I knew used SMS to some degree. Thus, I did not use a random sampling nor did I assemble a sample size large enough to offer reliable margins of error.

 

Table 1: Background information from P.J. Worsfold's September 2007 Field Research
Total participants 33
Location of participants Vancouver
Male to female ratio 13/20
Average age range 79% between the ages of 25-32

 

SMS: Functionality and Infrastructure

Text-messaging or simply texting, as SMS is commonly referred to as, has succeeded around the world in spite of hardware limitations, network incompatibilities, and a general lack of industry support in the medium's early years. Throughout the course of SMS's development, one can trace the emergence of individual empowerment in the process of mass communications and the importance of open standards in determining a technology's success; these factors now form the basis of many of today's most important technologies.

SMS's functionality is a result of the combined effect of its own technology and of the network or communication standard that it sits on. It seems logical to begin by discussing the technology of SMS before tackling SMS in terms of networks and standards. However, before continuing, it is important to note that SMS was originally developed as a component of the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) standard. In other words, SMS was originally a subset of a larger technology.

SMS took its lead from the mobile pager and its functionality has changed little since the late 1980s, when GSM engineers first drafted its requirements and specifications (Ling 147). Cor Stutterheim, an executive who worked on the development of SMS, recalls "[SMS] started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network… it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer" (Wray 2002).

In simple terms, SMS is a means of sending and receiving text messages of up to 160 characters between two or more mobile phones or between a mobile phone and a software application. SMS messages can be sent on a one-to-one basis or on a one-to-many or broadcast basis. While mobile-to-mobile, or person-to-person communications account for the most common use of SMS, mobile-to-software application SMS, which can be used to facilitate the delivery of simple, database driven information requests, such as traffic reports or directory assistance, is a tremendously powerful functionality of SMS . The SMS standard supports the English alphabet and its common grammatical symbols. Additionally, various character sets have been developed to make SMS communication possible in many other languages; however, the character limit for languages that use non-Latin characters such as Arabic or Japanese is 80 characters.

The process of sending an SMS message is similar to that of placing a call on a mobile phone. Using their mobile phone's keypad, a user typically inputs the recipient's number, which is the same as the recipient's mobile phone number, along with a message. Upon completion of the message, the user presses the send button and, depending on the network's traffic and configuration, the recipient receives the message in a matter of seconds. Once they reach their recipients, SMS messages can be read immediately or stored for a later perusal.

When envisioning an SMS message as it travels from sender to recipient, it is important to note that SMS works on a store and forward basis. This means that, instead of going from handset to handset, as is the case between two walkie-talkies, SMS messages go through various network nodes before reaching their destination. Thus, SMS is able to leverage the reach of its local network as well as that of any of the world's SMS enabled networks and users can send and receive messages wherever they have access to a mobile network. SMS's store and forward functionality also means that messages can be temporarily stored on the network if a recipient's phone is off or out of range; this is of course markedly different from traditional broadcast media, which must rebroadcast in the event that their intended recipients are unavailable.

As Ling notes, SMS introduced two major innovations. First, unlike pagers, SMS enabled devices can send as well as receive messages. Secondly, SMS is a push technology, meaning that messages are sent to recipients, removing the need for SMS users to access a server to check for new messages (Ling 147). SMS's use of push technology is an important difference between SMS and email, which typically relies on a pull model.

As mobile communications have continued to develop, so has SMS technology. In the medium's early years, the short battery life, awkward keyboards and difficult to read screens posed significant problems. However, in the last decade major strides in handset technology, such as higher-resolution screens and predictive text software have helped to resolve many of these issues. The technology world is abuzz with discussion on how the functionality of SMS will be improved in the coming years. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which allows users to include audio, image, video, and rich text formatting in their messages, has already been deployed on various mobile networks, including Canada's Rogers network. However, MMS remains limited by bandwidth, network, and usability issues (Grenville 2004). The elegant simplicity of SMS is an integral part of the medium's success and thus, one wonders where it could be improved upon.

As ingenious as its design was, SMS would never have succeeded if it were not for the success of the GSM. Conceived in 1982, by a coalition of 13 European countries, the GSM was established to standardize cellular communications systems between the participating countries. At the time of the GSM's formation, the mobile communications landscape in Europe was home to a variety of competing technologies and providers. Among an assortment of complications, this resulted in poor cross-network interoperability as well as a mishmash of different pricing structures. While the lack of mobile communications standards was indeed a global issue, with their highly mobile populations, various currencies, and close geographic proximity, it was an issue that was perhaps most keenly felt by European countries.

Making its debut in 1993, the GSM standard, complete with its built-in SMS functionality, soon began to flourish throughout Europe. By the end of 1995, GSM had a strong presence in India, Africa, Asia and the Arab world and by 1997, it had a foothold in the U.S. market. Today, GSM technology delivers seamless, same-number coverage to customers in more than 170 countries (GSM World 2007). While specific market-share numbers vary, GSM is now recognized as the world's dominant mobile communications standard. Given GSM's tremendous success, one would expect it to be a clearly superior technology. This however, is not the case. The consensus amongst mobile communications experts suggests that, amongst leading communications technologies, no one standard is clearly superior.

GSM's success is largely a function of the open philosophy it was designed under. In contrast to the guarded, proprietary nature of competing standards, such as Qualcomm's CDMA technology, any company wishing to make GSM-compatible equipment can access GSM specifications and quickly begin development. Thus, many of the world's largest communications and electronics manufacturers including Motorola, Lucent, Nortel, Samsung, Panasonic, NEC, Toshiba, Nokia, Ericsson, Mitsubishi, and Siemens have embraced the standard (3G 2003). Additionally, while proprietary technology can be modified at the discretion of the technology's owners, potentially leaving operators and consumers in the lurch, the GSM standard is maintained and managed on a collaborative basis. All modifications and developments of the standard occur under the guidance of the GSM Association, which includes representatives from more than 690 GSM equipment manufacturers and network operators (GSM World 2007). Although SMS has now been adapted to support non-GSM standards, SMS will always be tied to the GSM, whose developers recognized that in order for the world to communicate our devices must speak the same language, even if we do not.

SMS: Around the World

While the 1990s saw the GSM network spread throughout Europe, the speed of SMS adoption varied from country to country due to a combination of social factors and business decisions. For example, the medium met with early success amongst verbally reserved Scandinavians (Barkhuus 4), whereas it took longer to catch on in Italy, a country with a strong oral tradition. Today however, with 85% of mobile phone owners having sent an SMS message (M:Metrics 2006), Italians are among Europe's most avid SMS users. Elsewhere SMS was stymied by the failure of mobile carriers to realize the medium's potential. For instance, in a move that was completely at odds with GSM's open approach, U.K. based mobile carriers attached complex pricing strategies to SMS and blocked their customers from using SMS to communicate with the customers of competing carriers. It was not until 1999 when carriers began offering prepaid or pay-as-you-go SMS packages and cross-network compatibility that use of the medium began to make significant growth.

Following the lead of their European counterparts, most mobile carriers in Asia began offering prepaid SMS packages and the medium soon became wildly popular. As in Europe however, various cultural factors contributed to different rates of SMS adoption from country to country. For instance, in Japan and South Korea, where talking loudly on a mobile phone in public is considered rude, SMS proved to be a logical fit. Yet in Hong Kong, the same social rules do not apply and thus, SMS adoption rates in Hong Kong lagged in the early going (Lin 2005).

In China, SMS's popularity was spurred on by high mobile penetration rates, low cost and several cultural factors. Most notably, for the first few years that SMS was available in China, it was not subject to the same level of government surveillance and censorship that were in effect elsewhere in the country's communication systems. Thus, the medium became a popular means of discussing ideas that ran contrary to Communist Party policy. Lim credits SMS communications amongst the people of China with helping to expose the government's cover-up of the SARS outbreak in 2003 (Lim 2004). Unfortunately, in 2004, the Chinese government implemented an extensive SMS censoring strategy and the medium has become heavily monitored.

In spite of government intrusion, SMS continues to be immensely popular in China. This is due to a number of factors. As McGrath points out, "the Chinese language is particularly well suited to the telephone keypad, because in Mandarin the names of the numbers are also close to the sounds of certain words; to say "I love you," for example, all you have to do is press 520" (McGrath 16). Furthermore, in China many people feel it is rude to leave someone a voice mail; additionally, placing a call to someone important only to have that call answered by an underling can be seen as a loss of face (ibid 16). SMS provides an elegant solution to both of these cultural nuances. Somewhat pessimistically, McGrath concludes, "text messaging preserves everyone's dignity by eliminating the human voice" (ibid 16).

When the GSM standard arrived in Canada and the U.S. in the early 2000s, several issues hampered SMS's adoption. For instance, while the high cost of local phone calls and the dominance of the GSM standard acted as catalysts for SMS's success in Europe and Asia, Canadians and Americans had long been accustomed to unlimited local calling being included with basic landline services. Furthermore, in 2000, GSM operators accounted for only a fraction of the mobile communications market . North American carriers also fell victim to some of the same miscalculations that afflicted European carriers in the late 1990s. Rheingold recalls, "U.S. operators did not bypass their corporate cultures, [they] made text messaging too expensive, [they] failed to bridge barriers that prevented messages from traveling between different operators, and [they] marketed text messaging services to thirtyish executives rather than teenagers" (Rheingold 22).

A number of social factors also limited SMS's early appeal to Canadians and Americans. As Ito notes, on average, Americans have more private space, larger homes, less reliance on public transport, higher levels of PC penetration, and more affordable web access, than those living in Asia and Europe. Therefore, while Chinese teenagers sitting in their kitchens would use SMS to interact with their friends, American teens would do their socializing in their bedrooms using Instant Messaging (IM) applications on computers that their parents bought for them. Likewise, while a Japanese business commuter on a train would use SMS to interact with peers, their Canadian counterpart would have a spoken conversation on a mobile phone as they sat in their car during the gridlock of the morning commute.

However, as mobile carriers began to switch to the GSM standard and with the introduction of cross-standard SMS in 2002, SMS began to take root in Canada and the U.S.. Additionally, SMS's popularity in Canada and the U.S. was also stimulated by the introduction of more affordable, European style bundled pricing. While Americans, and presumably Canadians, still rank well behind the world's most active SMS users, as of August 2007, 43% of American mobile phone owners were using SMS (Neufeld 6). Moreover, Ahonen points out that SMS usage rates in the U.S. are perfectly matched with those of European countries four years ago. Ahonen concludes, with "absolute certainty, SMS will be as huge in America as it is in Scandinavia, Korea, [and] Singapore" (Ahonen 2006).

SMS: Developing World

According to Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association, in 2006, GSM became "the first communications technology to have more users in the developing world than the developed world" (GSM World 2006). While phrases like 'democratizing effect' and 'bridging the digital divide' are thrown about far too liberally by representatives of the communications sector, the impact of mobile communications in the developing world has been tremendous. For those living in developing and newly industrialized countries, SMS offers a combination of low cost and reliability that no other communication tool provides. Thanks to SMS, individuals who were previously locked out of the digital revolution are being offered a chance.

Within the developing world, Africa presents unparalleled opportunity and potential for SMS. As of 2006, Africa was home to the world's greatest annual increase in mobile phone subscriptions. From 1999 to 2004, the number of mobile phone subscribers in Africa increased from 7.5 million to 76.8 million, resulting in an average annual increase of 58% (LaFraniere 2005) and yet, most Africans still do not own a mobile phone. SMS is already used extensively in Africa as both a means of person-to-person communication and to provide useful information such medical advice and employment listings; market prices of agricultural goods, and, within national parks, to communicate sightings of endangered animals. Furthermore, SMS has proven to be an invaluable political tool in various parts of Africa. While residents of Zimbabwe use SMS to receive uncensored news (BBC Feb 2007), SMS was used to combat fraud in the 2007 Nigerian national election. Leveraging the power of Nigeria's 30 million mobile phone subscribers, volunteers from a group called the Network of Mobile Election Monitors monitored polling stations and reported suspicious activity via SMS to the authorities based locally and abroad (BBC Apr 2007).

"The most avid text-messagers are clustered in Southeast Asia" (McGrath 16) and Filipinos rank first as the world's most prolific SMS users. In 2004, the people of the Philippines sent a daily average of 200 million total messages, which translates into 2.4 messages sent per capita (Bulos 2004). The power of SMS in the Philippines gained international attention during the revolt against President Estrada in 2001, which was organized extensively through SMS communications.

In newly industrialized countries, where people struggle to achieve western levels of convenience and consumption on miniscule salaries, SMS's cost effectiveness is tremendously important. While Telus clients in Canada could expect to pay up to 15 cents per SMS message sent, users in the Philippines pay as little one Canadian cent per SMS message. Such attractive pricing strategies have been extremely effective; 45% of the country's adult population now owns a mobile phone. However, with 51% of the country earning less than $2 a day, it seems logical to assume that the market has reached capacity. Yet, in an effort to expand their businesses, mobile operators in the Philippines have introduced programs that allow subscribers to resell SMS credits to their friends and neighbours. By allowing people to buy SMS service in increments priced as low as 4 cents, SMS use is now common among even the poorest Filipinos (ibid).

Not only does SMS facilitate cost-effective communication in the Philippines and in other newly industrialized countries, it delivers internet access to those who could not afford a computer or who live in areas with little or no communications infrastructure. Aside from providing news and information, such internet access provides useful and inexpensive financial services, which westerners might take for granted. As of 2006, 16 million South Africans, more than half of the adult population, did not have bank accounts; however, 30% of this same group did own mobile phones (Economist 2006).

As The Economist observes, in South Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, financial institutions have begun providing basic banking services using SMS and other mobile communications technologies. Aside from providing account information, M-banking, as this service is called, allows customers to use their phones to pay for retail goods, thus removing the need for credit cards or cash (ibid). M-banking also gives the many people who leave remote villages throughout sub-Saharan Africa to seek work in urban South Africa or in other African countries, the means to easily transfer funds to family members back at home (Anderson 2007). The importance of such a service is underscored by a recent statistic offered by the U.N., which states that in 2005, global migrants sent $232 billion back to their families, of which 20% was lost mostly due to bank charges and fraud (Economist 2006).

SMS-based banking is used extensively in the Philippines, it looks promising in South Africa, where roughly 500,000 people use the service (ibid), and it has proven to be a success in other newly industrialized countries such as China. However, mobile finance has significant technological and security related issues, which give critics cause for concern. It should also be noted that SMS's potential in the developing world is constrained by low levels of literacy and language diversity, which poses a problem for content creators and handsets manufacturers. Jain contends that, in Africa these challenges may mean that the "medium is unlikely to succeed for significant parts of the population" (Jain 2006). We must remember that, although the technology will certainly help matters in the developing world, the potential of SMS cannot be fully realized until basic social needs are properly addressed.

SMS: Developed World

With 57.4% of the G8's citizens online (Internet World Stats 2007); the increasing availability of free wireless broadband internet access in schools, libraries, and other public places; the popularity of instant messaging (IM) applications and social networking sites, and VoIP technology making telephony affordable to practically anyone, SMS has a great deal of competition in the developed world. Nonetheless, in July 2007, 4.5 billion SMS messages were sent in the U.K. alone (Text.IT 2007), while in 2006, Canadians sent 4.3 billion SMS messages, nearly tripling 2005's SMS traffic (CWTA 2007). The numbers are similar wherever one looks, even though we are confronted with a myriad of options, SMS is proving to be one of the developed world's dominant modes of communication.

SMS's popularity in the developed world demonstrates a different side of its appeal and a fascinating contradiction. In this section, I will explore SMS use in the developed world. I will examine who uses the technology, the unique traits of SMS communication, the medium's appeal, the purposes that SMS serves, and some of the medium's common criticisms. SMS is both a tool of convenience, which is customizable to individual preference, and a medium of complex socialization and psychological development, wherein users literally spell-out the realization of highly personal visceral needs.

SMS's Users

In the introduction of this paper, I suggested that SMS is often dismissed as communications tool useful only to teenagers; this is certainly not the case. According to Eurescom, a European telecommunciations research and development group, in 2000, the average age of an SMS user was 30 (Eurescom). However, as the medium gets older, the age of its average users is likely to rise. A 2005 survey done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that, while not surprisingly, 63% of mobile phone owners ages 18-27 used SMS, a sizable 31% of mobile phone owners ages 28-39 were active SMS users, as were 18% of mobile phone owners in the 40-49 bracket (Pew 2005). Further demonstrating the wide appeal of SMS, M:Metrics, a mobile market research company, found that in the U.S., the fastest growing group of SMS users are those in the 45-64 age group. M:Metrics reported that between September 2005 and September 2006, the number of text-message users within this group "grew about seven times as fast as among teenagers under 18" (Johnson 2006). Finally, Ahonen suggests that in Europe and industrialized Asia, SMS is so common that the notion of a median age for SMS use has become moot, as such a figure would likely parallel the median age of the entire population (Ahonen 25 Oct 2007).

Although men were SMS's early adopters, today, most research shows that women send "significantly more messages, on a daily basis, then their counterparts" (Ling 148). Moreover, females are said to be "more adroit texters" (ibid 165), sending messages that are longer and more complex than those sent by men. Extending the debate and stirring up a little controversy, Barkhuus and Vallgårda argue, "a general trend is that women tend to send messages of non-essential character, where the men stick to essential messages of practicalities (or polite answers to the women's comments!)" (Barkhuus 4). Taking a more pragmatic view, Ling attributes the popularity of SMS among women with the fact that women typically possess superior communication skills than men. Referring to women's epistolary aptitude and phone call prowess, Ling observes, "women generally seem to have better interaction skills. In spoken conversation, it is reported that women are better at the strategic introduction of topics of conversation, women are more accomplished at the use of rhetorical devices in order to maintain conversation, and they are more likely to use various forms of critique and interpretation" (Ling 164).

The evidence is irrefutable; SMS is no longer the exclusive domain of young people, if indeed it ever was. However, it would be foolish to ignore the fact that SMS is currently most popular and most identifiable with the younger segment of society. According to a recent report from JupiterResearch, 80% of American teens with cell phones regularly use SMS (Olsen 2007). The tremendous popularity of SMS amongst teens is attributable to a number of factors. First, as Rheingold points out, young people are often early adopters of new technology because they tend to have more free time to learn how to use a new technology and fewer attachments to older ways of doing things (Rheingold 24). Additionally, young people tend to be less averse to risk and are therefore more willing to try something new. However, there is much more to SMS use among young people than a general predilection for new technology.

As I will discuss later, SMS has particular attributes that make it an ideal communications tool for a time in life that is heavily focused on socialization and creating an identity. Additionally as Ling contends, "mobile telephony and texting are particularly suited to the nomadic nature of [young peoples'] life phases. They allow spontaneity and a dynamic style of planning that is not as necessary in the more staid and routinized mature adult phases of life" (Ling 165). Finally, SMS offers teens a sense of privacy that is hard to come by elsewhere in their day-to-day lives. Lin observes that this aspect of SMS can be very attractive to young SMS users in countries such as Japan, where young people are subject "to a high degree of regulation and surveillance" (Lin 2005). Without the "means to share some private physical space free from adults' surveillance" (ibid), SMS provides young people with a 'virtual hangout'.

Upon analyzing SMS according to the age and sex of its users, one is left wishing for the help of additional demographic details such as the ethnicity, education, marital status, and geographic location of SMS users. Although, SMS's use is clearly so widespread that it would transcend many demographic lines, a better understanding of the medium could certainly be reached with this information. However, such data does not appear to be readily available. This is probably due to a number of factors such as the fact that SMS is a relatively new medium and thus, usage information is either unavailable or accessible only through expensive reports from research firms. In any case, further analysis of SMS according to user demographics should be noted as a direction for future research.

SMS's Appeal

In trying to understand the appeal of SMS, Ling argues, "data from Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Norway all point in the same direction, namely, that it is cheaper to send a text message" (Ling 150). SMS may indeed by cheaper, yet, in the face of SMS's growing and widespread popularity and the numerous communications alternatives that consumers have at their disposal, Ling is clearly selling the medium short. For instance, in their study of SMS users, which I will return to shortly, Barkhuus and Vallgårda stated that most of their participants reported that cost is never on their minds when using SMS. Similarly, only 12% of the participants in my study regarded low cost as SMS's chief appeal. Of course, everyone likes a bargain and a low price would motivate people to try SMS, but price alone cannot be responsible for turning one-time users into repeat-customers. I am in firm agreement with Taylor and Harper who believe the typical claim that SMS is "easy, quick and cheap" (Taylor and Harper 4) is inadequate to explain the ubiquitous nature of the medium.

It is my contention that the 'typical claim', which Taylor and Harper refer to is demonstrative of society's tendency to misunderstand media that I commented on earlier. We place such primacy on the words 'easy', 'quick', and 'cheap', that if we can attach them at all to any of life's mysteries, we feel that we have unlocked their secret and we cease to consider things further. Nonetheless, this discussion would be remiss if it did not explore the cost of SMS.

Table 2 compares two consumer oriented pricing plans offered by two mobile communications providers, Vodafone, which is based in England, and Rogers, which is Canadian (Vodafone 2007; Rogers 2007). I selected these companies for comparison simply because they are the first that came to mind in their respective markets. However based on my research, their prices are in line with those of their competition. While each company offers numerous contract-based and pay-as-you-go plans, to simplify this process of comparison, I have selected the mid-level offerings of each.

 

Table 2: Vodafone and Rogers Pricing Comparison
Carrier Name Vodafone (England) Rogers (Canada)
Plan Type 18 month contract: £35.00/month Pay-as-you-go 1-3 year contract: $45.00/month Pay-as-you-go
SMS Traffic Unlimited SMS £.10 per SMS* 2500 SMS messages/month $.15 per SMS
Voice Traffic 500 voice minutes/month £.30/minute peak hours
£.10/minute off peak hours
free weekends if you spend over £2.50/week		 250 voice minutes/month $.30/minute peak hours/ $1 a day unlimited evenings and weekend
* Pay-as-you-go customers on Vodafone can also buy blocks of SMS messages. Charges range from £5.00 for 70 messages to £20.00 for 675 messages.
Note: pricing does not include tax, cost of handset, setup fees, or miscellaneous monthly charges. In addition, both companies only charge users for outgoing SMS messages, as is standard practice.

 

As one can see from the table, SMS is least expensive when purchased through the long-term contracts, either of which would easily sustain the monthly average of 100, 65, and 32 SMS messages sent each month by SMS users in the U.K., Germany, and the U.S. respectively (Morgan 2007). However, these contracts force the customer to subscribe to voice traffic as well as SMS service for a specified term and the financial penalties of breaking a contract can be steep. Moreover, if we forget for a moment that the terms affordable and cheap are highly subjective, at £35.00 and $45.00 a month respectively, the offerings from Vodafone and Rogers could be considered affordable by most standards, however, it would be a stretch to call them cheap. Without the advantage of bundle pricing, the cost of SMS can quickly add up. Newspapers and websites abound with stories of heavy SMS users unknowingly accruing staggering SMS charges because their mobile plan did not offer bundled SMS savings.

As an interesting aside, while SMS may be deemed affordable, it could certainly be much more affordable. Mobile carriers in Europe and North America have been roundly criticized for the hefty margins they place on SMS, which range from 70% - 90% (Kuittinen 2006). This trend shows little sign of abating, in August 2007, the U.S. mobile operator, Sprint raised the hackles of its customers by increasing its pay-as-you-go SMS rate to $.20 per use. Ahonen adds that even with a worldwide average cost of less than 4 cents per message sent, SMS is still the most profitable global business of all time (Ahonen Oct 2007).

Once one dispenses with the issue of SMS's cost, the medium's greater appeal becomes visible in both the versatility of the communicative styles it enables and in the purposes that it serves. Ling describes the writing style of SMS as a "a trans-linguistic drag queen, since it has features of both spoken and written culture but with enough flair of its own to catch your attention" (Ling 162). Echoing Ling's sentiments, Reid and Reid add, SMS combines the "sociability of the chat room… with the psychological distance of electronic mail", which gives the medium a "special, but paradoxical, appeal" (Reid 2).

As Ling and Reid and Reid allude to, the style and pace of SMS communication varies according to the needs of its participants and, within the confines of an SMS exchange, either of the communicating parties are able to adjust and manage the nature of the communication as they see fit. Offering instant gratification to some and time for reflection to others, SMS can facilitate a witty back and forth banter or calculated intellectual discourse. Reid and Reid summarize the versatility of SMS, observing that on one hand, "the immediacy, mobility, and perpetual accessibility afforded by the mobile phone allows near-conversational levels of synchronous texting" while on the other hand, "the texting interface presents the user with an asynchronous medium similar to email, allowing time for composition and reflection" (ibid 2).

Referring to my data, the following statistics offer an interesting commentary on the duality of SMS communication.

  • 54% said that proper spelling was very important in the messages they sent
  • 63% said that speed was SMS's biggest appeal
  • 75% respond to messages within 10 minutes
  • 54% expect a response within 10 minutes

With 54% of respondents taking the time to at least reflect on the spelling of their messages, a task that would be much more difficult in the confines of IM, SMS's asynchronous nature is clearly appealing to some users. However, as the remaining three statistics indicate, the majority of the users I surveyed responded most favourably to the medium's speed. Rather than a paradox between written and spoken communication, my data paints SMS as a balanced, communication hybrid.

The capacity to be different things to different people is a crucial part of SMS's appeal. Through its versatility, one can see how users of various personality types would find SMS to be a means of expression that is accommodating and comfortable. Yet this alone does not adequately describe SMS's appeal. To understand the medium, one must still ask, what purpose does SMS serve, and more specifically, what does SMS do that other communications media do not? This question in best dealt with in two parts. First, I will outline the four categories of SMS messages as defined by Barkhuus and Vallgårda and secondly, I will explore users' motivations in sending these messages.

In their 2004 report, Saying it all in 160 Characters: Four Classes of SMS Conversations, Barkhuus and Vallgårda observed several dominant trends in their subjects' SMS use. The authors note that, while their subjects used IM applications in both social and business contexts to communicate with contacts based locally and abroad, SMS use was used primarily to communicate socially with friends and family living nearby (Barkhuus 3). Unfortunately, the survey I designed did not ask participants whether they used SMS in a business context. However, with 67% of my respondents saying that fewer than 10% of their SMS contacts lived more than 100kms from them, my data does concur with Barkhuus and Vallgårda's conclusion that SMS is a tool used primarily in a local context.

Barkhuus and Vallgårda divided the reasons for their subjects' SMS use into 4 categories: meta-communication, information request communication, socially based communication, and awareness facilitating communication . The first category that Barkhuus and Vallgårda define, meta-communication, simply involves users asking others if they are available to converse on another medium. According to Barkhuus and Vallgårda, this sort of communication is most popular amongst teenaged SMS users whose opportunities for frank communication may be limited by the presence of parents or other family members (ibid 6).

Although Barkhuus and Vallgårda found that this type of communication occurred infrequently, as Figure 1 illustrates, meta-communication was the most common reason for SMS usage in my research. It is important to recognize that this prevalence of meta-communication poses a significant challenge to McGrath's contention that the nebulous distance SMS places between sender and recipient "may be the universal attraction of text-messaging" (McGrath 16). While McGrath asserts that SMS serves as "a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication… [without] the burden of actual intimacy or substance" (ibid 16), the specific function of meta-communication is to facilitate more effective communication at a later period.

Figure 1: Most Common Types of Messages Sent According to My Research

Information request communication involves activities such as exchanging email addresses, phone numbers, meeting times, and the status of someone's whereabouts. Barkhuus and Vallgårda's data concurs with the findings of others, which point to information request as being one of the most common applications of SMS (Barkhuus 6). Next, Barkhuus and Vallgårda offer socially based communication, which they define as communications "that support social structures and common practice" (ibid 7). Examples of socially based communication include asking someone 'how things are going' and wishing someone a 'good night'. In these types of communication, the literal content of the message is secondary to the sender's true intent, which is to maintain existing social connections. Barkhuus and Vallgårda note that the frequency of socially based communications were limited and did not exceed more practical reasons for SMS use (ibid 7). Assuming that the Barkhuus and Vallgårda define practical uses of SMS as the combined total of the information request and meta communication categories, my data supports their findings. However, with 27% of total traffic, socially based communication did account for a significant portion of SMS use in my study.

Closely related to socially based communication, awareness facilitating communication encompasses messages communicating non-essential updates of the sender's situation. The intent of awareness facilitating communication is simply to make the recipient aware that the sender is thinking of them. Barkhuus and Vallgårda do not mention how frequently they observed messages of this sort and my data attributes only 12% of total SMS traffic to awareness facilitating communication. However, Barkhuus and Vallgårda point to the importance of awareness facilitation in communication design and they laud SMS for being able to express a sense of awareness without the video, without sensors, [and] without context clues (ibid 7). For Barkhuus and Vallgårda, SMS's capacity to communicate awareness is one of the medium's principal advantages.

The Purposes SMS Serves

Based on Barkhuus and Vallgårda's research, I have concluded that there are two types of SMS messages, those that are motivated primarily by practical purposes, including meta-communication and information request communication, and those that are motivated primarily by psychological purposes, which include socially based and awareness facilitating messages.

The practical purposes that SMS serves can be seen directly in the medium's subject matter. Ling highlights the convenient and practical nature of the medium, suggesting that SMS "allows us to coordinate everyday activities, to send endearments, get quick answers to questions, and keep one another up to date" (Ling 147). However, the practicality of SMS exists as much in the way that it lets people communicate as in the things it allows them to say. Barkhuus and Vallgårda note that many of the participants in their research responded to the less intrusive and less intimate nature of SMS and reported frequently using SMS as a means to contact those whom they would not feel comfortable speaking with on the phone (Barkhuus 7). This aspect of SMS also relates to observations made by Reid and Reid, who suggest, that the control of pace and expression that SMS affords the user is helpful in the expression of self. Reid and Reid conclude that, particularly amongst those prone to social anxiety, SMS is likely to help in the development of new relationships and to affect, in a positive way, their existing relationships (Reid 9).

SMS's capacity to help its users meet deep-seated social and psychological needs is one of the medium's most intriguing characteristics. Reid and Reid argue that "for a significant number of users, sending a text message may be more important for building and maintaining social relationships than for coordinating practical arrangements" (ibid 2). Adding to the discourse on SMS's psychological appeal, Barkhuus and Vallgårda contend that the medium's very existence serves an important purpose for some people. For this group, the state of perpetual connectedness that SMS provides them with offers a source of comfort, reminding them that they are always part of a larger group who are only a few keystrokes away (Barkhuus 5).

The most poignant data on the psychological appeal of SMS has been observed amongst SMS's younger users. Yet, reaffirming my belief in society's tendency to discount and under-appreciate communications technology, Pressler observes, "now that texting has exploded in America, it's regarded as one of the current teen generation's inexplicable behaviors, like instant-messaging or spending hours on Facebook" (Pressler 2007). While young people's motivations for using SMS are complex, their behaviour can hardly be called inexplicable. Indeed, such behaviour is a result of the need to define oneself and socialize with others. These same factors would drive a journalist to sport a favourite hockey team's logo on a t-shirt or inspire a group of baby-boomers to attend a dinner party. To teens, SMS, like Facebook, is a medium in which to forge individual and group identities in a realm outside of adult supervision. As Rheingold contends, SMS is "used by young people today as the raw material for identity and group-shaping activities" (Rheingold 159).

While teens undoubtedly send SMS messages that would fall into Barkhuus and Vallgårda's information request category, research suggests that teens and young adults send considerably more socially based and awareness facilitating communications than older SMS users. Thurlow's 2003 study of SMS use among a class of first year university students found that only 31% (Thurlow 2005) of messages were of an informational or practical nature, whereas the majority of messages fulfilled "phatic, friendship maintenance, romantic, and social functions associated with highly intimate and relational concerns" (Reid 3).

In his analysis of how young people use SMS to build and explore their own identities, Rheingold references Goffman's concept of the presentation of self. Looking past the obvious content of communication, Goffman held, "the ways people communicate and the groups they use as audiences… are part of the social machinery they use to construct identities" (Rheingold 25). This presentation of self has two distinct parts; the inward, which deals with process of testing out and exploring different identities, and the outward process, which deals with the expression one's identity to others (ibid 25). SMS allows users to addresses both elements of the presentation of self.

From an inward perspective, the indirect nature of SMS communication gives its users the ability to explore different personalities. Lawson explains, "you can say things in a text dialogue that you wouldn't normally say face-to-face or in a voice call (Brier 18). Of particular value when dealing with the opposite sex, in Goffmanian terms, SMS lets users try on different faces and explore "different sides of their personalities [without] the social consequences associated with face-to-face encounters" (ibid 18).

From an outward perspective, SMS lets users express themselves to others in both the thoughts they convey and the manner in which they articulate themselves. Comparing SMS messages to the lyrical style of hip-hop music, McGrath views the act of writing and sending an SMS message as a performative process, in which writers sometimes strive "not so much for clarity so much as a kind of rebus-like cleverness, in which showing off is part of the point" (McGrath 16). Similarly, Thurlow refers to the presence of a personal style within many SMS messages exchanged between young people; whereby recipients can recognize a particular sender through their use of abbreviations, emoticons, and other discursive style markers (Thurlow 2005).

An additional element of the role that SMS plays in the process of identity creation amongst young people is the medium's capacity to unite its users; Ling contends, the mobile phone is "used in the integration of the teen peer group" (Ling 5). From a practical perspective, mobile phones, and especially SMS, allow teens to coordinate plans and socialize. Yet, from a broader perspective, teens' comfort with the medium plays perhaps an equally important role in creating a shared identity. Goggin observes, "young people took to text-messaging as a tactic of consolidating their shared culture, in distinction from the general culture dominated by their parents and other adults" (Lin 2005).

While SMS skill helps young people with questions of identity, the sending and receiving of individual messages has been shown to serve a crucial and longstanding need to establish and maintain social relationships. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as gift giving, a process where structured and reciprocal acts are used "to mediate the social relationships of teenagers" (Taylor and Harper 3).

Gift giving involves young people using SMS to send each other simple and seemingly mundane awareness facilitating or socially based messages. The intent of these messages, whether the senders realize it or not, is to nurture their relationship with the recipients and to let the recipients know that the sender is thinking of them. Of course, in sending these messages, the sender is hoping that his or her offering will be reciprocated, so that he or she will know that the feeling of friendship is mutual. Throughout the course of a 10-week study on the SMS habits of a group of suburban English teens, Taylor and Harper recorded extensive SMS gift giving activities. They noted that in some cases the process transcended mere message exchange and moved to phone sharing, where, in a display of trust and solidarity, teens pass others their phones so that they could read a particularly interesting SMS message. Taylor and Harper conclude, "the phone and its content, it might be said, allows young people to take part in gift-giving using distinct repertoires, or 'social markers', through which they are able to negotiate and renegotiate their social relationships" (ibid 17).

Criticisms of SMS

From classroom cheating, to bullying, and sexual harassment, SMS, like all communications media, has been used in numerous undesirable contexts. Yet, criticizing SMS based on its role in such activities only encourages people to fear technology and subscribe to a misguided belief in technological determinism. We must be careful not to mistake people's actions for technology's effect. There are however, two commonly heard criticisms, which relate directly to SMS, that I would like to address in detail.

According to many, SMS and all other mobile communications technologies work only too well, mobile communications have become too pervasive in our society and they have created an expectation that we must make ourselves constantly available to the communicative requests of others. Barkhuus and Vallgårda refers to several studies that have documented the stress that this "expected constant availability" engenders (Barkhuus 5). Following a similar line of thought, Heidegger offers the notion that modern technology is "something which 'enframes' or converts the world into a resource to be utilized" (Lin 2005). Applying Heidegger's argument, Lin suggests, "the new mobile communication technologies convert people into resources [and] to be constantly on call/in touch is to be constantly instrumentalised by others" (ibid).

In spite of such criticisms, the data gathered by Barkhuus and Vallgårda suggests, "SMS is in fact aiding users in controlling [the] constant availability that a mobile phone generates" (Barkhuus 5). Echoing Reid and Reid's conclusions relating to SMS's capacity to lessen the stress of those prone to social anxiety, Barkhuus and Vallgårda find that active SMS users apply the technology as both a buffer against more interruptive voice calls and as a means to organize the voice calls that they make. Barkhuus and Vallgårda note that just under 20% of their subjects kept their mobile phones set to silent or vibrate; thus deciding for themselves when they are available (ibid 5).

The next criticism of SMS that I shall address relates to the medium's effect on language. As Thurlow points out, "much popular and public discourse nowadays attends to the perceived communicative paucity of young people and both 'teen-talk' and 'netlingo' (or 'webspeak') are often blamed for supposedly negative impacts on standard or 'traditional' ways of communicating" (Thurlow 2005). More specifically, SMS has been roundly criticized for the emoticons, phonetic spellings, acronyms and various other forms of abbreviation that the medium has helped popularize. In a scathing article published in The Guardian, John Sutherland, Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, summarizes this sort of criticism. He argues, "as a dialect, text ('textese'?) is thin and unimaginative. It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk. The dialect has a few hieroglyphs (codes comprehensible only to initiates) and a range of face symbols… Linguistically it's all pig's ear… Texting is penmanship for illiterates" (Sutherland 2002).

As I have argued throughout this paper, arguments from people like Sutherland only underscore their own fear and failure to assess the medium. Not only do these alarmists demonstrate a poor understanding of the development of language and the relationship between speech and the written word, their conclusions have little empirical support. For instance, regarding the notion that SMS use is creating a generation of illiterates, a recent study from Cambridge University found that today's SMS obsessed teens "were using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling than their 1980 counterparts" (Youth Studies Australia 4).

Before considering the effect of SMS on traditional written communications, it is important to explore the factors that have given rise to SMS's abbreviated style. Based on his own extensive research and with reference to the work of others, Thurlow concludes that the linguistic shorthand that users of SMS have developed is a result of three sociolinguistic maxims: brevity and speed; paralinguistic restitution; and phonological approximation (Thurlow 2005).

Thurlow's maxims are all geared toward the "principle of sociality" (ibid) or the desire to make SMS conversation as much like face-to-face communication as possible. For instance, although, the brevity of SMS communication is due in part to the medium's 160-character limit, Thurlow found that the average SMS message was 65 characters; a number that is significantly lower than the medium's capacity . Thus Thurlow concluded, "the need for both brevity and speed appears to be motivated less by technological constraints, but rather by discursive demands such as ease of turn-taking and fluidity of social interaction" (ibid). Similarly, the second and third maxims, which are demonstrated by the use of regiolectal spellings, such as Londoners using 'novern' for 'northern', and a range of onomatopoeic spellings such as 'haha' or 'arrrgh' (ibid), are driven by the desire to instill within SMS communication key qualities of face-to-face exchanges such as intonation and rhythm.

In spite of arguments offered by Thurlow and others, as well as common examples of language being adjusted by its users to support a particular context and purpose, such as in telegrams or stenography, critical discussion on SMS abbreviations frequently invokes the term 'code'. Referring to a 2001 Pew Internet and American Life Project report, which referred to the language of young IM users as a "new hieroglyphics" (ibid), Thurlow contends that "lay and academic discussions about the language of text-messaging are invariably caught up in an exaggerated sense of its impenetrability and exclusivity" (ibid). However, while the notion that SMS communications abound with "codes comprehensible only to initiates" (Sutherland 2002) sounds scary and no doubt helps to sell newspapers, it has little factual support.

With regard to the severity of SMS abbreviations, Ling's analysis "shows that in spite of all the discussion of this issue, only about 6% of the messages contained these forms of language" (Ling 160). Similarly, Thurlow found that there were "few examples of items which were not semantically recoverable, even in isolation of their original context" (Thurlow 2005). Thurlow concludes that that claims "for the impenetrability and exclusivity of SMS language are clearly exaggerated and belie the subtlety and contextuality of discourse" (ibid).

While some fear-mongers in the academic world argue that SMS is "part of a continuing assault of technology on formal written English" (Lee 2002), the fact remains that languages are constantly evolving and it is logical to assume that SMS abbreviations may eventually influence this process. Of course, language logically requires standardization, however, language is a tool that we can adapt to fit new contexts. Jesse Sheidlower, the North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, points out, "there is no official English language" (ibid). Sheidlower reminds us that language is not spread by the wishes of one person or group, but by the decisions of "the people who use the language" (ibid). Pennycook concurs and adds, "the idea of languages as discrete, stable, monolithic entities with solid boundaries is actually the product of colonial knowledge production" (Lin 2005).

While written language develops according to the application of those using it, it is also important to remember that "written language is itself a convention and always an abstraction from spoken language" (Thurlow 2005). If the written word is subservient to the spoken word, then the written word is surely at its best when it most closely approximates all aspects of the spoken word. Thus, we ought to perceive orthographic modification as part of a positive evolution. Thurlow takes this notion further, arguing that by endeavoring to replicate elements of face-to-face conversation, "typographic practices of text-messaging offer more 'correct', more 'authentic' representations of speech" (ibid).

Conclusion

McLuhan argued that the message of any medium or technology "is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (McLuhan 8). I have shown that SMS is responsible for numerous changes around the globe. While the scope of these changes is broad, I have endeavoured to highlight a theme of individual empowerment that has run throughout the course of SMS's development and adoption. GSM, and thus SMS, were born of the need to create a network that would allow individuals to communicate easily wherever their lives took them. Although corporate strategies helped stimulate its use, SMS's early adopters chose the medium not because of marketing ploys but because it simply met their personal needs. While users in the developing world benefit from the direct access to information and communication that SMS offers, users in the developed world employ the medium in their individual processes of self-discovery and socialization.

Yet, still some conclude, "the most depressing thing about the communications revolution is that when at last we have succeeded in making it possible for anyone to reach anyone else anywhere, at any time, it turns out that we really don't have that much to say" (McGrath 16). However, after listening to SMS's message, it is apparent that we have plenty to say; namely that we are ready to take the communications media into our own hands. With SMS, and other technological phenomena, like Web 2.0, podcasting, and on-demand television, this process has begun. And, if SMS is right, the successful communications technologies of the future will build on this movement and feature open standards, less bureaucracy, and more personal control.

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