Text, text, text

• Richard Johnstone
• Inside Story: Politics, society and culture

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29 October 2008The short list for this year?s Global Mobile Messaging Awards provides a window to the future. One of the finalists in the Innovation in Messaging category is SpinVox Messenger, an application that ?automatically converts a voice message into text and delivers it directly to the recipient as an SMS, ensuring call completion (and) stimulating call continuity?. The spoken word segues into text of its own accord, without the need for human intervention. ?Messaging,? comments one of the judges not quite illuminatingly, ?is helping us to re-examine the importance of voice.?

The eventual winner in the Innovation category also does what it does automatically; in this case by ?automatically saving every text and photo message on line.? The evanescence that was so much part of the essential character of mobile text messages is a thing of the past; ?your taxi is on approach? can now live forever on the hard drive. In another example of the unlimited potential of text messages, we learn from pangolinsms.com that ?Pangolin?s Interactive Messaging Unlimited software is perfect for concerts,? where it is used to display SMS text messages on giant TV screens onstage, a practice that has been growing in popularity over the last few years. Again something that seemed so innately characteristic of the text message, a private communication transmitted to a screen only just big enough to read from, is transformed into a public display. How did it all happen, and so quickly?

Is the energy, liveliness and to-the-pointness of text-messaging already history?