1. Introduction and background
1. Introduction and backgroundNearly a billion text messages whizz around the UK every month. Whenever and however you like to send you text messages, it’s a completely individual way to express yourself. (Orange Magazine, Spring 2001)
Mobile phone ownership is universal, and people use them constantly. If you don’t have a mobile, you’re effectively a non-person. (www.orange.com).
Figures and claims like these abound regarding the popularity, ubiquity and capacity of mobile phones in general and text-messages in particular (Teather, 2001). It seems that these technologies for communication have become an essential feature of both popular and commercial rhetoric about new media cultures and especially of so called ‘global communications’. Which is not to say that this technology is properly global; worldwide patterns of mobile phone usership necessarily follow the socioeconomic contours of which distinguish the 'media rich' and 'media poor' more generally (Carvin, 2000). Nonetheless, from a more academic perspective, Katz & Aakhus (2002) cite figures estimating the worldwide usership of mobile phones is approaching a billion. (This compares with an estimated 600 million people online <www.nua.com>). Although not true for the USA, where the internet continues to be the communication technology of preference, penetration rates in countries in Western Europe (e.g. Scandinavia, UK, Germany & France) and East Asia (e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and Taiwan) are believed to be as high as 70-80%. [note 2]
According to Umberto Eco (2002), we live in an age where the diminutive, the brief and the simple are highly prized in communication; if this is the case, then there’s little doubt that text-messaging embodies this zeitgeist. Like many earlier communication technologies, however, the mobile phone has come to evoke and/or embody a range of projected fears and hopes (Turkle, 1995). In fact, the history of the development of communication technologies is one marked by periods of excessive hype and hysteria about the kinds of cultural, social and psychological impacts each new technology is likely to have. Having said which, few people – professional or lay – could have predicted the extraordinary rise in popularity of the mobile phone in many countries and its sister technology SMS (‘short messaging service’). Initially intended for purely commercial purposes (Bellis, 2002), text-messaging is in fact yet another example of how the human need for social intercourse – a kind of ‘communication imperative’ – bends and ultimately co-opts technology to suit its own ends, regardless of any commercial (e.g. the telephone) or military (e.g. the internet) ambition for the technology.
Typical of media representations about the role of mobile phones in the lives of young people, Bryden-Brown’s (2001) characterization in the The Australian newspaper (heading above) presents yet another image of the media-savvy, technologically-enslaved young person [note 3]. It is not unusual for young people to be caught up in adults’ anxious projections about the future (Griffin, 1993; Davis, 1990); in the case of mobile phones, however, there’s a double-whammy of adult mythology, with the coming together of popular discourses about young people and about new technologies combine. Increasingly, writers are starting to challenge the misleading hype inherent in popular notions like ‘cyberkids’ and the ‘net generation’ (e.g. Thurlow & McKay, 2003 in press; Facer & Furlong, 2001; see also, Holloway & Valentine, 2003). In fact, as Keri Facer & Ruth Furlong (2001) note, there are many children and young people in supposedly technologically advanced countries like Britain who still face a kind of ‘information inequality’ – not only as a result of poor access at home and school, but also because of individual resistance to, and the perceived irrelevance of, computing technology. It is precisely for this reason that homogenizing assumptions about the role of technology in the lives of young people and young adults need constantly to be challenged.
While exaggerations about the significance of personal computing may be questionable, the fact remains that, in many countries, the mobile phone is an altogether far more popular, pervasive communication technology than in others (Katz & Aakhus, 2002). What is more, although by no means any longer the sole province of young people (Cyberatlas, 2001a), in a country like Britain, it is understood that half of all 7-16-year-olds have a mobile phone of their own (NOP, 2001a) and marginally more girls (52%) than boys (44%). In fact, the same NOP survey also shows that as many as 77% of 14-16-year-olds have mobile phones. Richard Ling (2002) also reports recent figures from Norway, another mobile-saturated country, which specifically identify young adults/older teenagers as the heaviest users. Unquestionably, a core feature of almost all young people’s mobile phone use is the text-message, with most sending upwards of three text-messages a day.
Central to the hype and hysteria of popular, media representations about new communication technologies are concerns about the way that conventional linguistic and communicative practices are affected. A fairly typical example of this is the comment quoted in the heading above made by John Humpreys (2000), a British radio journalist notorious for his ‘verbal hygienist’ (Cameron, 1995) concerns about, amongst other things, the putative ‘death’ of the apostrophe in English. Much popular attention is given nowadays to the perceived communicative paucity of young people (Thurlow, 2001a) and both ‘teen-talk’ and ‘netlingo’ (or ‘webspeak’) are often blamed for supposedly negative impacts on standard or ‘traditional’ ways of communicating. The same is especially true of young people’s use of mobile phones and text-messaging, where they are often understood to be – or rather accused of – reinventing the (English) language (for a recent example, see Henry, 2002)[note 4]. In this sense, therefore, added to populist concerns about young people and new technologies are common folklinguistic concerns about threats to standard varieties and conventional communication practicesmore generally – that young people and new technologies might be to blame merely compounds matters.
With reference to other communication technologies – most notably the internet and web – scholars of computer-mediated communication (CMC) have for some time been challenging the assumption that technologically-mediated modes of communication are necessarily impoverished and antisocial (Walther & Parks, 2002; Spears et al., 2001). Not least because so much CMC is text-based, more specific interest has also been with emerging linguistic forms and practices – or computer-mediated discourse (CMD) (Herring, 2001, 1996; Baron, 1998; Werry, 1996; Collott & Belmore, 1996). One of the principle arguments of both CMC and CMD is that generalizations about communicative and linguistic practice are inherently problematic, conflating as they do important differences in the affordances and constraints of different technologies such as email, online chat, instant messaging, newsgroups and bulletin boards, webpages and ‘virtual worlds’. Spcifically, as Herring (2001) also notes, language will necessarily be affected by technological (or medium) variables such as synchronicity (e.g. where instant messaging is synchronous, email is asynchronous), granularity (i.e. how long or short text may be) and multimodality (e.g. whether or not graphics, audio and video are included), as well as other non-linguistic variables such as participants’ relationships, expectations and levels of motivation.
Apart from being unambitious, talking about text is yet another way of focusing on young people. …grown-ups often seek to legitimate their own conversation by orienting it around youth … putting their own spin on the youthful activity of text messaging – but what of the activity itself? (Calcutt, 2001)
Distinguishing between 'expert framing' and 'folk framing' respectively, Katz & Aakhus (2002) have recently commented on how little academic input there has been to balance everyday, popular discourses about mobile phones. While the Information Society Research Centre at the University of Tampere in Finland (e.g. Kasesniemi & Rautiainen, 2002) has been researching the mobile communication culture of children and young people since 1997, this is seldom the case elsewhere. What is more, for all the hype and hysteria about text-messaging and young people’s use of text-messaging in particular, I know of no research which has specifically examined the linguistic practices of text-messaging in the way that, say, Naomi Baron (1998) has done with email messages or Christopher Werry has done with online chat. Nor is there an extensive mobile phone survey to compare with the Pew Internet & American Life Project's (2000) report on the use of the internet and instant messaging (IM) among young American people – the CMC technology which competes most directly with text-messaging for the attention of young people in the USA.
It was because of this noticeable hiatus that I was keen to undertake the following ‘snapshot’ survey as a means of tracking the use of ever new communication technologies by young people, and as a way of rendering more empirical populist claims about the language text-messaging. The study also offers a different, British perspective. With both Baron (1998) and the Pew Report (2000) as useful backdrops, the current study was therefore framed by two straight-forward research questions relating to the linguistic forms and communicative functions of young people’s text-messaging: (a) what are young people using text-messaging for? and (b) to what extent are they experimenting with conventional language in their text-messages? It is answers to questions such as these which help to improve the sociolinguistic mapping of new technologies (cf. Thurlow, 2001b).
