The Two Sides Of Texting

Ubiquitous Message Technology Can Be Powerful Tool For Good Or Ill

(AP)  British soccer star David Beckham carried on an affair via texting and was undone when his pecked peccadilloes were revealed to the press.

Indonesian entrepreneur Craig Abdurrohim Owensby sends subscribers a daily text message with a verse from the Quran.

Critics have savaged the medium for its perceived depredations on grammar, punctuation and spelling. But texting has spawned its own literary forms.

An SMS poetry contest in 2001 produced a winning entry with these lines:

"txtin iz messin, mi headn'me englis,
try2rite essays, they all come out txtis..."

And in wireless-crazed China, author Qian Fuchang became the first text-message novelist in 2004 when he offered "Outside the Besieged Fortress," a steamy tale of extramarital love, in 60 chapters of 70 characters each.

But events have illustrated a much more serious side to a medium we have come to take for granted.

After terrorists flew two planes into New York's World Trade Center, United Airlines quickly sent a text message to its remaining airborne, transcontinental flights: "Beware any cockpit intrusion ..."

In Lower Manhattan that day, meanwhile, workers used their Blackberries to check on each other and give directions where to flee.

The same stealthiness that allows kids to cheat on exams enabled the girl in South Carolina to quietly message her mother precise directions on where to send help.

"im in a hole," she wrote to her mother on her captor's cell phone. "theres a bomb call police."

Joe Farren, a CTIA spokesman, says, "Emergencies now can be reported as they happen. There's no longer a lag time. And that has proven to save lives. And obviously the South Carolina incident is evidence of that."

In Ohio recently, a 15-year-old boy was arrested after a girl showed her father this message she'd gotten from him: "I'm bringing a gun to school and (name deleted) is at the top of the list."

Text messages leave a kind of electronic "paper trail" when the technology is abused.

Former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., has acknowledged using instant messages, a similar technology, to interact with House interns.

"how my favorite young stud doing," he wrote in one exchange. Those words, typed under the now-infamous cyberhandle maf54, could be used against him.

Electronic communication, some complain, can create the illusion of distance and anonymity and lull us into a false sense of security.

Cell phone technology has infiltrated our lives so much that we're "interpersonally stupid," says Bugeja, author of the book "Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age."

"We bought cell phones so that we can be safe, and then we use those cell phones to order pizza driving in a rainstorm," he says. "We're chatting with people we believe are friends who may turn out to be predators."

In a recent survey, 65 percent of parents who text message said they communicate more frequently with their children when they're away from home. Kazakoff says texting is merely an unobtrusive way to stay in touch, whether it's communicating from the other side of the world or just across the room at a noisy party.

"It's appropriate for certain situations," he says. "It doesn't replace face to face."

Jones concedes that technology made it easier for Foley to insinuate himself into the lives of his young charges. But it was not responsible for the conditions underlying those messages.

"In both the Foley case and the case of these (kidnapped) kids, there were no technological problems here," he says. "These were social problems."

[gladetryst]

Text messages don't kill people, people kill people.