Senator Barack Obama used one to announce to the world his choice of a running mate. Thousands of Americans have used them to vote for their favorite American Idol contestants. Many teenagers prefer them to actually talking.
Almost overnight, text messages have become the preferred form of communication for millions of people.
But even as industry calculations show that Americans are now using mobile phones to send or receive more text messages than phone calls, those messages are coming under increasing fire because of the danger they can pose by distracting those who send them. Though there are no official casualty statistics, there is much anecdotal evidence that the number of fatal accidents stemming from texting while driving, crossing the street or other activities is on the rise.
“The act of texting automatically removes 10 IQ points,” said Paul Saffo, a technology trend forecaster in Silicon Valley. “The truth of the matter is there are hobbies that are incompatible. You don’t want to do mushroom hunting and bird watching at the same time, and it is the same with texting and other activities. We have all seen people walk into parking meters or walk into traffic and seem startled by oncoming cars.” In the latest backlash against text messaging, the California Public Utilities Commission announced an emergency measure on Thursday temporarily banning the use of all mobile devices by anyone at the controls of a moving train.
The commission acted after federal investigators announced that they were looking at the role that a train engineer’s text messaging may have played in the country’s mostly deadly commuter rail accident in four decades.
A California state lawmaker is also seeking to ban text messaging by drivers, a step already taken by a handful of other states.
“We have had far too many tragic incidents around the country that are painful proof that this is a terrible problem,” said the legislator, state Senator Joe Simitian, who wrote the state’s hand-free cell phone law and is now pushing for the texting ban.
The fight against text messages is also reaching beyond the realm of public safety. The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s board recently upheld a 2007 ban of all text messages from coaches to student recruits. “The student athlete advisory committee believed that it was unprofessional, intrusive and expensive,” said Erik Christianson, a spokesman for NCAA.
Theaters, too, long accustomed to chiding cell-phone users and people who crumple their cough drop wrappers, have taken on texting. Aided by cell-phone service providers, parents have moved to limit the hours that their children may get and send text messages.
Text messaging — also known as short message service, or SMS — first took off in Japan, cell-phone technology experts say, because the cost of texting there was less than that of making cell-phone calls, and because the Japanese language was conducive to the practice.
In the US, the practice has accelerated greatly in just the last few years, as the technology has improved and ubiquitous devices have increased text users. In the US in June, 75 billion text messages were sent, compared with 7.2 billion in the same period just three years ago, according to the CTIA — the Wireless Association, the leading industry trade group.
RSS