Every great new invention has got a frumpy sister who is increasingly losing her youthfulness, her appeal, and her hair. Easily one of the greatest innovations of the last century is texting, which has revolutionized the way all people are heard and interact. Texting’s troll sister? Email.
Born in the dark ages of the 1960s, email made it possible for first businesses and then everyone to converse easily and compactly, spreading news and opinions at lightning speed without the hassle of sticky stamps or horrendously campy postal services. As lovely as the grizzled middle-aged women were who took your thick envelopes of secrets, human interaction was proving to be a hassle for the busy boys at DARPA. A few million dollars of military spending later, email was born.
That's all dandy as a piece of candy, but it still wasn't fast enough. The texting boom truly began at the dawn of the new millennium. It was then that the technological line between children and parents was drawn. The Text Generation has a lot to say. Unfortunately, though, most of those ever-so-urgent messages consist of one word or a menagerie of punctuation fashioned into a face, a favorite of the teens these days (Area ones not excluded).
My Lord almighty, what fates have smiled upon us with this hallowed invention! It's email for people who aren't near their computer but happen to be in the range of a magical tower that emits little waves of salvation! Therein lies the downfall of email. Naturally, it is still a highly used technology and is just as useful as it was fifteen years ago. But there's a better way. The perks that once made email special can now be had through text messaging. Even the technologically troglodytic non-teen population is catching on. With a simple text message, you can see how much you owe the plumber for that embarrassing drain issue, when your next hair treatment will be, what your wife is making for dinner, and what your mistress is wearing. Oh, how we have advanced.
If you want to get in touch with people, you text them. Humans these days have no time to be near a computer that’s signed into Yahoo, AOL, or — dare I speak its name — Hotmail. No time! Computers are just too slow. Kids these days have their phones attached to their hips. There are six year olds diddling away on Blackberries, and hardly a person from age five to 45 doesn't have a cell phone on them at all times. Unless they live in some dank, cell-service-less place, like Andes or Margaretville. One shudders to imagine it.
As with all good things, texting will die out soon enough. Surely there's some company out there punching out the dents in telepathic messaging. The future is on a bright LCD screen, but no one can see what it will hold. I mean really, the writing is tiny on those things.
Joe Harris is a pop-culture-obsessed 17-year-old living in Delhi, New York. He contributes cultural commentary to the Watershed Post. For more of his prose stylings, click here. Email him at areateen@watershedpost.com.
