Text in effect
8 May
He's just not that into (seeing) you
Every now and then we hit on something in the column that I don’t think is being written about much elsewhere and which I fight as hard as I can to get right. This week, the Digital Savant column was about the false intimacy we have with texting (which is as popular as ever and actually still growing in the U.S.).
It’s couched in a column that seems like it starts out saying, “Yay for texting, here’s why it’s not going away) but then takes a bit of a left turn to talk about cheating, the way we communicate with loved ones, why voice calls still matter (even as we make less of them) and then, in a sort of coda, a short bit about our wedding anniversary last week. (Which, per my wife’s request to be mentioned as little as possible online, I didn’t really talk about. Aha, but she didn’t say I couldn’t mention her in a column for the newspaper. Loophole!)
I mentioned that I was writing something along these lines last week on Twitter and Facebook and I got some really helpful, thoughtful responses that did help shape what I ended up writing. It’s one of those topics that everyone has an opinion about as I learned today when a reader emailed me:
“It’s just cool to become a gibbering idiot who is no longer obligated to spell correctly and string together coherent thoughts.”
Indeed, sir. Thx 4 the msg.
Son,
Meant to mention that alot of people don’t realize that texts are unlike emails. Texting uses udp protocol. The device sends the text without any guarentee that the text message will arrive. Unlike email where if the email fails to arrive, it sends back to youq some sort of notice of failure. A text may never get there for so many possible reasons but you’d never know. I’ve even gotten to the point that I assume it is identical like email but just sorter. No true. So if message needs to arrive for sure send just the subject line of an email instead.
Dad