The Txt

Effects of the Digital Age have reached into every aspect of our lives; they follow us into just about all of the places we are. No manifestation represents this more than the infamous "text message." Ephemeral and quick, these messages activate our cell phones at nearly any time and any place.

It is normally when I am attempting to savor some time in solitude when I receive one.

An abrupt and violent vibration on my upper right thigh, and a noise of some tiny weight whirring, just for a second, nearly makes me start. I am shattered. My mind scrambles for identification, for order to this unexpected descent into chaos; in the process, the state of mind that was moments ago so cathartic and enveloping is immediately dropped into oblivion. Oh, I realize, slightly annoyed. That's my phone. Someone has just texted me.

Sitting, but unwilling to exert energy to answer the message, I compromise and straighten my leg out, thrusting my pelvic bone into the air. The slightly frayed pockets on my jeans prevent my phone from coming out easily. My hands flick around the metallic mass, searching for the antenna (I have determined through empirical data that finding the antenna first is the easiest method for extracting my phone from my pocket). Out with my hand comes a gray rectangular box, not much longer or wider than a few of my fingers, heralding the current time, 11:04, and the message “1 message received.” Now that I know the time, I might as well re-examine the state of my physical being. I am currently Wil, by myself, and in my room.

Text messaging has often provoked this style of reaction from me. But this model of events is not just a recent development -- the idea of the telephone ring has triggered an abrupt dissonance for as long as I can remember. Until as recently as a year or two ago, my house would receive as many as 10 or more calls a day; my focus was obliterated by the end of each day by the mere anticipation of my focus being obliterated. The shrill sound that signaled someone in a far land beckoning my attention for a few lines of unimportant dialogue was an object of my scorn.

I received my cell phone about 2 years ago. After exchanging numbers with a few friends, instead of telephone calls, I unexpectedly began receiving texts. And it was invigorating – my friends and I communicated silently through truncated words and unfinished sentences. Messages received through the air, without the need for sound -- what strange space! (Words sound different on a page than they do vibrating through the air.) I envied the people I observed typing without looking, typing faster than I could. I envied the people being fast and secret. The sequence of buttons I watched people smoothly press would remain an abstract and intangible idea, an unreadable secret passed directly before my eyes, if the message was not sent to me.

Whenever I was alone, my friends were just a mere text away! I could even send and receive pictures. Whenever I wanted. The instantaneous sending back and forth of text words seemed much more efficient than wasting my time calling a person and using my voice with him or her. Unless a spelling error is made, a person cannot as easily misunderstand a typed word as opposed to a word heard through the phone speaker (in addition, my speaker is broken, making most speech I hear fuzzy, and to my dismay many times, silent). And after my message was sent, I was free to forget about my text and go about doing whatever I wish, until I received a response. And the culture surrounding text messaging is predisposed to the passing thought. Text etiquette does not require any cues on the parts of the speakers -- no "hello" or "goodbye."It ends just as quickly as it starts.

What I failed to come to terms with immediately, though, was the fact that my friends and I could mutually contact each other at any time. Including the times I did not wish to be disturbed, such as when I was trying to concentrate on homework, or had a headache, or had a sub-par day. Or, worse, when I thought what the other texter had to say turned out to be boring. Without fail, the frantic vibrations of an incoming transmission would decimate my state of mind. Consequently, I ended up having text conversations when I wanted to concentrate on other things. I re-discovered on top of this the possibility for text to miscommunicate easily a speaker's tone. With the element of voice removed, emotions got mangled and misunderstood through what at first glance appeared to be a straightforward, simple message. The sudden dissolution of my thoughts, the smooth surface broken by the telephone alert, returned.

So why do I still text message?

Partially because texts are convenient and more readily answered by most, to be honest. But the anticipation of the alert my phone will sound serves to keep me subliminally aware of my physicality. As my mind begins to stray away from my location on the ground, these messages and telephone rings come to me and literally nudge me awake. They challenge me to consider the world differently; without them, I may be living more through my mind, and may have forgotten that I can (must) live through senses as well.

This heightened consciousness of my place is accompanied by the consciousness of the place of others. Unpredictably, some person is in a spot that is not where I am right now, thinking a thought that led to their contact with me. It is entirely too easy for us to forget that people exist in places outside of our sensory range. Out of sight, out of mind. With this one person, who has texted me and is away from my physical location, countless others exist in between, beyond. The text message heralds the existence of the world through its implications. For every one that can text, others exist who do not have cell phones. And others who I have never seen; and others who are located on different continents; and others who are existing, along with me. Instantaneous, a glancing moment of clarity, these implications flood past with the message.

And valuable to me are the interactions I have had with people through cell phone space. Perhaps using text gives texters more time to consider their sentences; people undergo transformations when they reach my cell phone screen. People change according to the space they are given. Wonderfully interesting conversations have blossomed between various texters and I. Eerily beautiful fragments of sentences. Text messages give you the ability to stare at, revisit, contemplate the words they bear. Friends (I) have delivered painful transmissions. At times my heart races when the phone finally sounds its alert that a message has been received.

Recently I went to clear out my old picture messages (an enhanced method of text messaging in which messagers add text to a picture, and send it), in the hopes that my now-ancient phone would operate more effectively. What I found were documents -- documents of instants in time that I had long forgotten about. I found pictures of me and old friends in strange places; pictures people sent me that made me laugh; pictures of a foreign, distant person I once referred to as myself. The digital quality of the text allows for easy archival of what, at one point, we deemed appropriate to remember; things monumental and trivial are recorded. Like layers of Earth, we impress the matter of our age into the atmosphere.

The text message evokes my bittersweet acceptance. At times I wish I was not the owner of my cell phone. When I receive a text message, however, I rush with bounding curiosity and apprehension to read the transmission. At my very early stages of text messaging development, I received a text from a number I did not know. It read: "You sleep -- love is never wrong." As our tools become more complex, perhaps we distance ourselves further and further from the original medium; regardless, people can still produce some beautiful things.