Texting

Text Messaging/Texting/ SMS (short message service), is a form of communication in where typed messages can be sent phone to phone. In the article on mashable.com called “A Brief History of Text Messaging” by Christine Erikson, Erikson gives a short history on text messaging. According to Erikson, the concept of SMS was developed in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert during the Franco-German GSM cooperation. The first actual text message, “… was sent in 1992 from Neil Papworth, a former developer at Sema Group Telecoms. Mobile phones didn’t have keyboards at the time, so Papworth had to type the message on a PC. Papworth’s text — “Merry Christmas” — was successfully sent to Richard Jarvis at Vodafone.” Years later the technology for texting messaging improved over the years.

Erikson’s article on the history of text messaging, is written in a technological deterministic ( a term used by Brian Winston in his article “How are Media Born and Developed?”, as a view that technology extisting creates new events) perspective. The article does not mention any cultural reason for the invention of texting to come about, it only mentions on how the technology of SMS created changed how people now communicate.

Though this article has a technological deterministic perspective, I believe that the creation of SMS was because of cultural determinism( Culture comes first then technology). I believe this because people wanted a different way to communicate rather just using a telephone during the birth of the information age. They wanted to get a quick message across without having to connect to someonelse’s phone. With texting the message would almost always be recieved.