Social and psychological effect of SMS



Social and psychological effect of SMS



Psychological Effect:

1. Most people, who are using high-tech communicational way, can enjoy their lives is because they are having problem with communicating with people in face to face form, and that they are unsocial. (Mckenna & Bargh. 1998)

2. You don’t have to talk to people face to face; because it gives you time to think without any negative feelings, like embarrassed, awkward, nervous and guilty. (Chenault 1998; Danet, 1995; Ling & Yttri, 2002)

Social Effect:

3. You can contact anyone you want immediately and personally without looking for computer for getting internet. (Kasesniemi & Rautiainen. 2002)

4. People who like texting will get more closely relationship than people who like using voice call. (Reid, D & Reid, F, 2004)

5. Texting is helping (Chenault 1998; Danet, 1995; Ling & Yttri, 2002)

Generation Txt? The sociolinguistics of young people's text-messaging



SMS is becoming global communication way in people’s life, which gave a rise on the number of mobile phone users worldly. (Katz & Aakhus, 2002, p1)

Thurlow cited, in UK, almost a billion messages were sent every month. It seems that texting is a personal way to say anything from your heart, which also is very convenient, because you can do it any time and any where (Orange Magazine, Spring 2001).

New communicative technologies are considered as a necessary part of building the art of study of using language effectively and persuasively for new media cultures and “global communications”. Nonetheless, it doesn’t either mean those technologies has become appropriately global, or mean those people who are using mobile phones have rights to obey the social rule of communication. (Carvin, 2000, p1)

This communicative technology has spread in many other countries other than in America: Scandinavia, UK, Germany and France in Western Europe, and HongKong, Singapore, Korea and Taiwan in East Asia. According to the data, experts believed that 70% - 80% people in above countries has been affected by this new communicative culture. (Thurlow, 2006, p2)

“The Mobile Data Association shows that 1.7 billion text-messages were exchanged in Britain in May 2003 – a cumulative annual total of some 8 billion messages.” (Thurlow, 2006)

Bryden-Brown (2001) mentioned that those young people who are slaves of technology is called “technological-enslaved young person”. (Thurlow, 2006, p2)

Griffin (1993) thinks that it seems like a customer for adults, because they always concern about young people’s future. (Thurlow, 2006, p2)

Information inequality: a) poor access at home and school; b) individual resistance to and the perceived irrelevance of some new technologies (Facer & Furlong, 2001), cited by Thurlow (2006).

In mobile phone case, “double-whammy” of adult mythology: the coming together of popular discourses about young people and about new technologies. (Thurlow, 2006, p2)

Katz and Aakhus (2002) noted that the fact is the mobile phone is way influenced and pervaded as a communication technology other than others in many countries. (Thurlow, 2006, p2)

A group of data from Cyberatlas (2001) showed that half of all 7- 16-year-olds have their own mobile phone, 52% of which is girls and 44% of which is boys, and also 77% of 14-16-year-olds have mobile phones. (Thurlow, 2006, p2)

Thurlow (2006) cited that some recent figures from Norway stated that young adults/older teenagers are the heaviest users.

John Humphrevs (2000) made a comment quoted in the heading, indicating a British radio journalist, Cameron (1995), worried about English will be threatened to ‘death’ by the effect of the new communication technology. (Thurlow, 2006, p3)

Thurlow (2001a) said that net-based or web-based teen-talk has no positive effects on our standard, normal or “traditional” ways of expressing. He considered those young people who use mobile phones and text messaging as the same, thinking they are ruining the language-English.

Nonetheless, researchers like Kasesniemi and Rautiainen (2002) thought TM is not a bad thing, which actually is a code language, and gave young people a space to develop their creativity. (Thurlow, 2006, p3) And Crystal (2001) said netspeak does count to a part of history of language development.

The language is used by young people for instant message is named as a “new hieroglyphics”, was cited by Thurlow from Pew Internet and American Life Project 2000.

Crystal thinks SMS is just something that can give young people something simply to do in their spare time, which is considered ignoring the significance of TM in society. Actually, TM has essential but complexly power on language in our society. (Thurlow, 2006, p3)

The existence of TM is not replacing our long traditional language, just like technologies do not replace each other (Thurlaw, 2006), it is just another language form or a procession of language development.

TM is everywhere, such as in email, online chat, instant messaging, newsgroups and bulletin boards, webpages and “virtual worlds”. (Thurlow, 2006, p3)

Other non-linguistice variables: participants’ relationships, expectations and levels of motivation. (Thurlow, 2006, p4)

Those researchers didn’t know much about text-messaging from previous research, except Baron (1998) has done with email messages, and Werry (1996) has done with online chat. There is no any other research or survey on mobile phone can tell people that text messaging is so popular that can not be ignored, which actually made a scholar, Herring, could not get off himself to pay attention to it. (Thurlow, 2006, p4)

Considering message length, number of words/characters used, main typographical and linguistic content such as emoticons, abbreviations and letter homophones, and primary functional orientation. (Thurlow, 2006, p4)

“Youth”, in Griffin’s (1993) dictionary, means different, strange, exotic, and transitory. The same is in Thurlow and Mckay’s saying (2003), which expressed “new communication technologies can empower young people and many do indeed explore and develop imaginative ways of making the technology work best for them”. (Thurlow, 2006, p12)

Certainly, text-messaging is also popular with older teenagers. (Thurlow, 2006, p12)

Text-messaging is a combination, containing speech and writing, and traditional and untraditional linguistic elements, which is considered having “hybrid quality” as much as email. And it lasts in a very briefly time, just like instant message. (Thurlow, 2006, p14)

Just like what Herring (2001) in his proposal said, I would rather take text-messaging as another independent language that has its own form.

Non-standard orthography is another form of language that can express sender’s meaning in its own type form immediately, and it is going to challenge our traditional language, was mentioned by Jaffe (2000).

This unique language form is not only represents human’s high level head function, but also shows its function of communicating.

Texting is a language that can represent culture in itself, and every form of typography is from it will become popular.

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