Communication Revolution

Recently I have been using the text message service on my phone more often than I used to before. That made me wonder how did the text message service start in first place. I vaguely remember working as a programmer for transaction services software where I was coding services that could listen and respond synchronously or asynchronously. For a layman, synchronous means the service listens to your request and responds to it and the requester waits until the response is received, it all happens in real time. But operationally it was more efficient to create a bucket and drop your request in it and the service will take it when it is free and drop the response in another bucket from which the requester picks it at convenience. This way there is no real wait time and the requests with different response lengths can be handled optimally. This is asynchronous communication. Where I am going with this is that the birth of text message lay in the cheaper ways to communicate, ie asynchronous communication. It was very efficient and sometimes unreliable. A phone call is more reliable in a sense that the talk is real time and it does not function if one of the ends goes offline. It was expensive compared to sending an offline text which had a lower priority if resources were scarce. Text messages were very novel concept that worked on asynchronous or offline mode and could be scaled very fast by doing a broadcast. Though text messages started with the whole concept to save scare network resources and to ensure efficient processing of multiple request they have taken an entirely different sociological form today.

On a sociological level text messages start with very good intentions. I want to send a text as I don't want to disturb the other person and still convey my message and let the other person respond at their own convenience. If I want to invite many friends for an event I will just send a broadcast over text message and get done with it. but then starts the tricky part, text message does not generally come with an obligation to respond. Nor does it come with any formal communication protocols like hellos and good byes. Though the text message technology has become very reliable these days the users have made sure that the whole medium of text messaging remains in the gray zone of optional or delayed response. This is just an open secret or accepted norm for text messages. It is also interesting how the messages can be communicated tersely. If someone invites me for an event using text message service and if I don't want to go for some reason I can just type "Busy today. Will stop by other day", and there are no questions asked. even if a persistent invitee responds to my text by asking what I was busy with, I could give the real reason or not respond at all and there is no problem either ways. Compare this to a phone conversation, it gets more elaborate and committed conversation where excuses might not work. With text becoming more prevalent I see that people have stopped taking phone calls. I am sure the swinging pendulum that oscillates between texting and calling will reach its point of balance some day. But then sometimes I think text messages have lost their childhood innocence and have reached the post puberty age of a notorious teenager. Only time will tell how this adult will look like.