Digital Young

SMS as language “destroyer”

And, because SMS is considered to be a very fast function of cell phone, here are some crazy contests people really pay for to organize. In which purpose, nobody knows? Maybe just to prove who the fastest person is to have written a media message?!?

And how to write a SMS in Morse code. This is like a meta-function.

Wondering what I have been done so far, as a researcher and a cultural anthropologist, that I am entitled to talk about youngsters, urban culture etc, I thought it would be a good point to describe you, shortly, my researches.

I started with a research about the uses, practices and representations of SMS (Short Message Service) in youth culture. This research took me about 4 years, and it had a complex methodology. First, I have to say that I did a comparative field between Bucharest and Brussels. Why, you might say. Well, I wanted to see if the appropriation of SMS is a youth culture thing, therefore it would be expressed in the same way about everywhere. So, as methods, I started with passive observation in those places that youngsters go. For Bucharest, I talk about commercial centers, urban spaces where they gather, meet and explore, urban transportation. For Brussels, I can add restaurants, cause youngsters in Belgium go to restaurant with their parents.

I continued with participative observation. Meaning, concretely, to use my cell phone and send SMS in the places that I mentioned before, just to see reactions. Being in a youngsters group and socializing with them, I was using my cell phone, talk about my SMS with them etc. They also let me transcript the messages they had in their cell phones, even the most intimate ones.

After that, in-depth interviews and domestic observation, in their homes, showed me the full extension of the phenomenon, but also a distinctive difference between public uses of SMS and domestic ones. I continued with a journal where my subjects of research were writing the messages sent and received, the hour and the place where they were, but also describing the relationship with the recipient and the feelings he/she felt in the moment of reception of a message.

All this data gathered, I use it for my PhD thesis. Which, I hope, will defend in spring.

This month, at Science in Right Words radio show, I choose to talk about the specificities that relationships between teens and youngsters present inside of technological networks. Meaning that I find, and not only me, there are also other researchers that found pretty the same things when talking about social networking at youngsters, that inside of these technological networks like email, forum, chat, Instant Messenger, SMS, Twitter, MySpace, Hi5 etc appear small groups, reinforcing face to face socialization.

For example, we all know that every user of a technological network has a free or a restrained access; either one or another, he or she has to subscribe, getting therefore a brand new identity. This identity becomes “real” in these networks through the famous ID and by different personal data that each user chooses to put on these social networks websites. There are some insightful researches about how users choose what to put and what not to put, in terms of personal data, what data to display on these social networks, at http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/ and also on the Mimi Ito’s blog, a blog that I talk about at I also read category (http://www.itofisher.com/mito/). After getting this new identity, the user starts to find people to communicate with. Either he invites his pre-existing friends (people that he knows from real life), and this is the most common case for youngsters, either he spots people having the same interests or the same passions. Why would a youngster do this? Well, I think that having as many contacts as he can, chatting with his friends on these social networks is a clear sign of social valorization in front of the others. Something like “Hey, look at me how many friends I have!”.

Now, there is something interesting about the evolution of these social tech networks: if at their debut, there was few of them (email, chat rooms), today we can talk about an extraordinary diversification, each one of them having different values, rules and communication forms. There is the new world of knowledge and cultural production. People create content of their own. As Mimi Ito named this phenomenon, we talk about “Peer-to-Peer and Many-to-Many”: “this end-to-end architecture has helped support cultures of peer-to-peer (P2P) media distribution and many-to-many (M2M) forms of communication.” (see her blog).

A prejudice that was shared by all psychologists and theorists of technologies regarding young people’s use of these social networks was that youngsters diversify contacts and that this is a risk to their personal security or that using these networks increases computer addiction etc. I don’t know where do they come with these things, but what is really funny in all this is that practice has always showed the reverse. Meaning that the actual use and the actual practice of a social network demonstrated that youngsters use in a rational way personal data, they are very careful at who and what talk about, and also they mostly “bring” their already-made friends by direct socialization inside of these social networks. They form what other two Japanese anthropologists called “telecocoons”, meaning intimate micro-communities in which they feel protected, formed by people of their own age and with the same passions / interests. This observation might reassure teens’ parents.