Future generations unlocking a time
capsule full of a day's worth of our world's millions of SMS
messages would gain the kind of immediate feel for life as it was that
we get from rock paintings or hieroglyphics. Their high-tech (hopefully,
for their sakes, programmed to "mass-spam-ignore") scans would
reveal a lot from our creative textographics.
From our culinary
habits - they would turn up frequent transmissions of chocl8 or dinRL8R
details - to dating rituals and individuals' unedited personal
feelings about their life's events. After all, things that were
once said with flowers are now, acceptably, conveyed within 160
characters, in an SMS. On the darker side, humanity has conveyed
everything from divorce-by-SMS to bank-robbery-by-SMS in recent
years.
If British tabloids are to be held on their musings on
what their Queen does with her mobile, future scholars could, stumbling
upon such a log of time, for example, learn about past leaders of the
planet. Beating crusty history books' presentations - SMS being
mercifully concise, direct and often entertaining - the Queen's SMS
data (according to the tabloids) sent while walking on royal estates may
include some real stuff like "CD U gimme ods on 2.30 nags
Asct". (Could you give me the odds on the runners for the 2.30
horserace at Ascot?).
SMS Stream of
Conscious
The ever-growing unstructured SMS stream
of conscious often represents genuine and direct communication between
people - and it could, truly, hold a treasure of "real data"
for future generations. Indeed, SMS, with its humble beginnings (like
the PC, developers vastly under-rated people's use of it) even
calls to mind creative word artists like the G8 e.e. cummings. Cummings,
the most famously infrequent user of capital letters before SMS users,
wrote "since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax
of things..." and "life's not a paragraph..."
In addition to consistently impressive numbers - billions sent
worldwide each month - SMS has made it, no less, into the Concise Oxford
Dictionary (in an appendix for the first time last year) and several
guide books have already been published on
it.
Transl8it: For Generation Text, Generation
Confused
Recently a Canadian Internet company,
Transl8it.com, unleashed the world's first SMS translation engine
onto the web. Transl8it appears a handy tool for people wanting to
demystify cult SMS messaging. It could've been a smart thing, for
instance, for one cellular operator in Nigeria to harness, whose
creatives included the term BOGOF in advertising campaigns. Apparently,
they thought this would be interpreted as acronym cool-pop-culture speak
for "Buy One Get One Free" - but a lot of people just read a
somewhat impolite message. Hitting transl8it, they would have discovered
that BOGOF translates to, well, BOGOF, in "plain
English".
Transl8it.com tell us they got a great response
to their debut: hits went from a few hundred in the first week to over
100 000 a day in the first month. The translator has members from the
United Kingdom, New Zealand, Poland, Czech Republic, Indonesia,
Philippines, the United States and Canada, amongst other countries.
Expecting Big SMS Swell in North
America
Prez of transl8it Dan Wilton, based in
Ottawa, says they saw opportunity in a new generation of communicators
growing - and also were observing the mobile wave sweeping the world.
They feel an exponential growth wave in SMS, similar to that in other
markets, will swell, once it truly catches on in North
America.
Wilton reckons: "Sitting back watching the world
lead North America in the mobile services, we began exploring and
experimenting with this new technology, preparing for the storm we knew
it will bring in. We knew there were opportunities in the GSM space with
ringtones, logos, and so on, but we wanted to operate outside this space
and bridge web and mobile services."
He adds: "Our
backgrounds told us there was this new generation of SMS users out there
developing their own lingo, and all we wanted to do was help everyone
understand them. Often referred to as 'generation text', this
pop culture generation appreciates tearing apart the English language as
an extension of their personality and identity."
Wilton
says when they first shopped the idea of transl8it around; there were
investors who balked at the idea. "They said SMS is misunderstood
and too limiting to be a winning opportunity. On the other side, we have
read countless case studies showing how content is limited and carriers
are having issues reaching this younger generation. The challenge on the
table, for us, was to get the system running and have this demographic
of user sign-up and participate. From the initial reaction, we are doing
fine here, and everything is being executed according to
plan."
Somewhat Revolutionary Use of
English
According to transl8it, their membership
feel the engine is accurate and is impressed by the transl8it
machine's accuracy and the definitions to emoticons, acronyms and
lingo offered.
"More recent requests have been made for
the addition of slang as well as what online hackers refer to as
'haxor' - this should be operational later this quarter."
Observing the changes that SMS brings, Wilton sees the moves as
"somewhat revolutionary" for the English language.
Interestingly, the transl8it service not only is a cool machine
for youth - but may also be turning the light on for many parents. Those
not attuned to terms like LOL, may at last understand all those LOL
responses on SMS or email. Parents who thought LOL was a mystical form
of endearment or positive response to statements like "I hope
you're not skipping class" must be feeling a sense of profound
revelation, even if they're not laughing out loud.
IC... Light Dawns
"The
youth are leading the changes. There are many standards to this lingo,
yet so many people in the older generation feel disconnected and they
can't quite seem to understand it. Sometimes it makes me wonder
just how long people have been receiving emails with LOL, CUL8R or ;) in
them without people even knowing what it was written
for."
Word-fatigue and grammar rebellion may also be
drivers of SMS, feels Wilton. Some people who elicited "so you
think you're e.e. cummings?" remarks from the most inflexible
regulators of the English language, when experimenting with the lower
case in college papers, are amongst the most ardent users of SMS today.
A friend of mine bears such a traumatic brush with the guardians of
English in her history, and has recovered well thanks to release from
capital-guilt that therapeutic free form email and SMS
brings.
rEDN dem out lowd
underRstNd?
Comments Wilton: "A certain part
of me believes that this text lingo came about because people were tired
of typing grammatically correct sentences that Miss Moyes our
quintessential English teacher would grade us on. Instead the youth took
it upon themselves to write what they heard in the funkiest fashion
possible." (so, nw we R L w msgz dat U undRstNd jst by rEDN dem
out lowd...Wilton demonstrates)
Transl8it is focusing on
SMS-to-English translation. Will they take it into universal translator
mode? "A universal translator to SMS sounds great, though I think
there will be a few complications in developing an 'inference
engine' that could identify universal languages before throwing
them over to English and vice versa. Right now, our efforts are tough
enough in trying to stay on top of the latest lingo and phrases over a
common denominator - being English. Possibly in the future we may
introduce to the community a couple of other languages and see what our
members will do to help populate
it."
Carol Posthumus is a freelance
author, analyzing how mobile technology impacts our lives. She lives in
Jeffreys Bay, South Africa.