The Text Generation

;The downfall of Philippine President Joseph Estrada earlier this year is an example of what the people can do when they're well armed--in this case, with mobile phones that deliver short, simple text messages. Opposition organizers used this powerful new medium to broadcast details of upcoming rallies, reaching 100 supporters at a time. And this is no isolated case. On Valentine's Day, lovesick Thais crashed the country's largest mobile-phone network by sending 100,000 messages in less than an hour. In Finland, the average teenager is now thought to tap out 100 messages a month. A Danish medical clinic recently admitted its first texting addict, a chauffeur who sent up to 200 messages a day.

Something strange has happened to the mobile phone. In defiance of all industry forecasts, today's user seems to want to write, not chat. SMS, Short Message Service, has been around for a decade, but in recent years it began spreading like a virus throughout the globe. Last year the number of messages sent jumped fivefold, reaching 15 billion in December alone, or 200 billion in the past year, by some estimates. "The growth has been just amazing," says Bryony Clow of Vodafone, the world's largest mobile-phone network. "And there seems to be no end to it." Consultants at Logica, the U.K. software firm, reckon that by the end of 2002 the monthly total may reach 100 billion--or more than 15 messages for every person on the planet.

This phenomenon has surprised everybody. The telecom industry adopted SMS as a standard technology in 1991 as a way to sop up extra network capacity, just in case somebody somewhere might find it useful. Unlike e-mail, text messages arrive almost instantaneously, so that two people can have a text-based conversation as though they were in an Internet chat room. At first, subscribers were able to send messages only within their own networks. The service was neither advertised nor promoted. Phone manufacturers were no more ambitious: telephone keyboards are optimized for numbers, not letters. On many handsets, it still takes plenty of scrolling just to find the menu options for texting.

A year or two ago, teenagers and twentysomethings spotted potential. Here was an efficient way of communicating that had the powerful charm of novelty. Numbers rose rapidly, especially in the tech-friendly countries of the Far East and Scandinavia, where the mobile-phone boom first took off among young consumers. "This was the accidental revolution," says Simon Buckingham of the Mobile Lifestreams consultancy. "Consumers just adopted SMS as their own medium. Every generation needs its own way of expressing itself; this is the text generation."

Devotees say the charms of texting go far beyond novelty. The service has all the immediacy of a phone call--as well as extra privacy and just a hint of the subversive. "My dad overhears me [talking] on the phone all the time, but I don't have to worry about that with text messages," says Chika Saito, a high-school junior in Japan who sends about 10 messages a day. "I can punch the buttons real quick, using just one hand, and my dad says it drives him crazy just seeing me do it." Background noise is no problem--ever tried talking on a mobile phone from a crowded bar?--and reception isn't an issue. Besides, SMS is a handy means of ducking those big emotional challenges. A survey by the British polling firm MORI found that a heartless 13 percent of users have used text messages to break off relationships.

Best of all, the text habit doesn't strain even modest student budgets. A brief message--the technology allows a maximum length of just 160 characters--won't usually cost more than 15 cents. "It's cheap, it's quick and it's international," says 21-year-old Paris student Lara Bourji. "I can send a mes-sage anywhere in the world for one franc." These budget rates encourage constant, informal text conversation. Says 15-year-old Christina Jensen from Copenhagen: "I send and receive between five and 10 a day, mostly things like 'sleep well,' 'how'sit going' or 'see you tomorrow ' . " Popularity now seems to be spreading across the generation gap. "It is better than any answering service," says 45-year-old Rome housewife Annamaria Lovari, who lives without e-mail or a fixed-line phone. "My sons always let me know when they have arrived at their destination with a text message instead of a call."