Notes

Note 1 Headline quote from BBC News (2000). Text messaging grows up. [Return to text]

Note 2 See also Agence France-Presse. 2002. Wireless net unpopular, text messaging is king. [Return to text]

Note 3 In Germany, one of Western Europe’s greatest SMS-using countries, young people are similarly cast as the ‘handy generation’ (Rössler & Höflich, 2002:10), ‘handy’ being the colloquial German word for a mobile phone. [Return to text]

Note 4 In an article titled Delete text message style, say examiners: ‘Answers peppered with soap opera phrases and written entirely in text message shorthand are posing new challenges for this year's GCSE markers …fears have been expressed that the texting phenomenon could undermine children's grammar.’ (Henry, Julie in the Times Education Supplement, 16 August 2002). [Return to text]

Note 5 Brought to my notice subsequently, Androutsopoulos’s (2000) typology details most of the same features, although labels them differently. [Return to text]

Note 6 Hoping that it was not during lectures given by me, this was by no means the only such example of participants having sent or received messages during lectures! [Return to text]

Note 7 This text-poem was awarded top prize in a well-publicised, national competition run by The Guardian newspaper in 2001. [Return to text]

Note 8 The facility for screening calls is also commonly afforded by answering machines. [Return to text]

Note 9 Counter-claims are often made regarding the concomitant loss of control over one's accessibility and the blurring of the boundaries between public and private. As Katz & Aakhus (2002) comment, 'perpetual contact' has both its negative and positive side. [Return to text]

Note 10 In the context of mobile phones and text-messaging, Rössler & Höflich (2002) characterize this same process as ‘intramedia convergence’. [Return to text]

Note 11 In their paper on the uses and gratifications of mobile phones, Leung & Wei (2000) discuss how mobile phones are ‘more than just talk on the move’. [Return to text]

Note 12 Speaking of the way chain messages may gifted, Ling & Yttri (2000:159) characterise messaging as ‘an updated version of passing notes’; this would seem to be the case for their linguistic form as well. [Return to text]

Note 13 M37 (Welsh): Good morning moz.Sorry for waking you up!Are y (~) coming to the medieval Europe lecture at 2?If yes, d’ya wanna meet in front of the law building at 1:50?Niaxxx; M38 (Welsh): Ello darling.Love you lds; M39(German): Are you ok?.[Return to text]

Note 14 In fact, Baron (1998) makes the same observation about email. [Return to text]