The first SMS text was sent 20 years ago by Neil Papworth. The text was sent from a PC because phones didnt yet have keyboards. The message was sent to a friend across town that simple read "Merry Christmas".
2002: Text messaging really explodesMore than 250 billion SMS messages are sent worldwide.2010: The service peaksThe International Telecommunications Union reports that 200,000 text messages are sent every minute. 6.1 trillion texts are sent worldwide over the entire year.
From the analysis of conventions, it is evident that text messaging has changed
the way of society. People on average send more texts than ten years ago and this is due to the convenience of messaging as it is instant and easy to communicate as every mobile phone has the messaging services. You are now able to send photos, videos and voice notes on imessage
for free, meaning that people arent having to pay extra money. This is influenced by the conventions because when text messaging came around, you was only able to send a message with letters only. whereas now you can have a full conversation as if you was on the phone because people can hear your voice and still understand the emotion of the text.Another way the conventions have been influenced, is by the new form of messaging which is emojis. These are symbols which have faces on them and flags which represent emotion. Emojis are a major part of everyday text messaging with teens and young adults especially to communicate and convey laughter or saddness. This has became so popular that now when you purchase an apple iPhone and any apple device, one of the languages available is the Emoji. Another form influenced by the conventions of the new society is 'Text language' this is when people shorten words but still have the same meaning, this has come around as it means that people can spell words quicker and the reader at the other end of the message still understands, for example words such as lol and g2g. Although this has brought up many opinions on what age children should be allowed phones to text as the 'text language' is being shown in their school work and teachers say its affecting the way of their learning because 'text language' is only a phase and isn't English that young children need to know.
When analysing text messaging there is many things you could analyse.
1) What type of language are they using? is it text language ( E.G lol) or Actual English?
2) What form of conversation is it? are they using long paragraphed messages or short messages (Whats the dept of conversation?)
Who dominates the conversation? Who has the most utterances?
Does the conversation consist of interruptions?
Does it consist of emojis (indicating an age group)
Capital letters or exclamatory sentences
grammer and punctuation (indicating an age group or class)
"Now this is a story all about how my life got twister upside down, now I'd like to take a minute just sit right there, tell ya how I became a prince of a town called Bel Air"As you can see from this image, Emojis are used in a very easy way to represent a word without actually using letters. Articles also suggest that Emojis is the only language in the world which everyone from every country can understand without actually having to be taught it. This is because they're the images represent certain things which everyone see as the same. For example '
This is the most popular terms of text language. The most common terms is LOL. This as two meanings. usually older people will use LOL as a term for 'lots of love' where as younger adults or teens would use LOL as 'laugh out loud'.As you can see the terms are usually made by the first letter of the word, for example - GR8 the word 'Great' starts with GR and 8 is what finishes the word off. This is understanding as to why teachers are concerned with children having phones too early because it means that children will think that writing in text language is ok when it isn't because its shortening words and not pronouncing words how they're supposed to be.