Texting....

Is it not amazing that we have become accustomed to having conversations in sentences that are no more than 160 characters in length and that never before have we typed on a keyboard as much as we do today.  We are surrounded by a myriad of texting applications-SMS, Twitter, Facebook, BBM, WhatsApp and many more-and whats more is that they have all gone mobile.  Would the Remington company, who developed the QWERTY keyboard layout, have imagined that their design would become ubiquitous? 

To be able to communicate using only 160 characters, you have to pack more meaning into your messages or attempt to get more words into the limited space that you have. The younger generation seems to have got this down to a tee and trying to decipher one of their messages would require the modern equivalent of the Rosetta Stone and a concise dictionary of hidden meanings.  Believe it or not but, more often than not, entire conversations are carried out in just one line of text.

For example texting, the correct term for communicating using the above mechanism, the words "I am fine" has taken on a whole new meaning.  It does not only mean I am fine, as it traditionally did, but also that I am ok with today in fact I am great and I am having a fabulous time and all my family and friends are also fine and my dog, cat and any other that shares my life or that I share my life with is fine.  How do I know this, how many times has someone responded to "I am fine" with "and how is the family?"... I rest my case.

This has also given rise to new ailments for example BBM thumb is a stiff cramp in the thumb caused by trying to locate and move the thumb rapidly across the BB keyboard in an attempt to write a message as quickly as possible without pressing the wrong key.  I am waiting for the first mobile phone thumb plastic surgery where the thumbs can be reshaped to perfectly depress a single letter on the keyboard without touching any of the adjoining keys.

Touch screens are none the better and common ailments such as index finger swipe syndrome, caused by trying to swipe at screens that are not touch screens with ever increasing amounts of pressure causing a strain in the ligaments often caused when moving from a touch screen device, such as an iPad, to a standard PC or laptop.

Has not occurred to the designers, of these devices, that the thumbs are not exactly quite as nimble as they believe they are and that they do not have the surface area of a pinhead to depress the ever decreasing size of the character buttons that they design.  I can just imaging the conversation in the lab:

"How would the user enter text into the device? Hmm... lets see the index finger would be great as everyone can finger type with the index finger. Hmmm too easy, I know the thumb......"

Don't they get it? the only thing the thumb is good for in typing is pressing the space bar.

And what happened to the nice comfortable huge space bar that used to be present. Even though it is the most important and most common character that is used across all languages, it is now relegated to an oversized button instead of the nice comforting long key that is present in all keyboards.

And how about the predictive text mechanisms that have become prevalent in the editors today always trying to predict what you are going to type and consistently getting it wrong.  I thought that these things would make a recommendation based on the most common used words however I suspect that the designers got one small little detail wrong, like, the common words used in South Africa are not the same as the common words used in Timbuktu!

now give me a second...I have to text a response to an SMS I just received ;-)