the bright side of text messages?

Disclaimer: I text message.

Ok, I like the text message. In fact, I like them a lot.

I first found them useful as a music publicist. When in a loud club or bar, it's great not to have to leave for the front to communicate where in the locale you are situated so you can meet up with your friend/colleague/journalist in question. So, it was useful to me.

Then I found that I could romanticize the text message a little bit. Isn't it a wonderful thing that someone out there thought of YOU when they were experiencing something WONDERFUL or AMAZING? When they were seeing something for the first time, and you came to mind, they picked up their phone and sent you a virtual message. When they missed you, they send an emoticon. They attended an event that you were attending and they had a text convo during the event with YOU. You got to experience the event one step closer WITH them.

This is what I like to imagine the text message could be. If you told the person you cared for that this is what it meant, then I would hope the world would love it even more. Revel in it, perhaps.

But every glass gets cloudy. At some point someone started labeling a late night text as a booty text. Someone else included reaching out with a text message as unemotional, and lacking in effort. Yet another person started the rumour that using a text message was an inferior cost-saving (read: less important) way of communicating. Then someone created a mass text list and tried to reach too many people with a thoughtless message or group joke. Another group condemned the newly-coined "sexting" as an utterly distasteful exchange of sexual thoughts.

And before you know it, the text message is diluted. Ineffective. Sad. Meaningless. Dirty.

I'm sad that text messaging has sunk to this level. I still truly think there's a little romance in some of my messages. If I were on the top of the Eiffel Tower and I sent you a text from there, I would hope you thought for a second that I could have been doing a number of things other than send you a message, but I didn't. Instead, I reached for my phone, send you one line of love and pushed send. I wasn't scared of your opinion of me. I hoped you might receive my message and respond.

I think that it can surely enhance a sparkle that exist in that other's eye. It might even be a tool that reveals a side of the other you didn't know was there.

A quick survey of Urbandictionary.com reveals many negative affiliations with text messaging. They manage to define everything from text mess: n: a text message which:
1- provides you or another person with "too much information"
2- begs for sexual favors, money, and/or a chance to reunite romantically
3- contains many misspelled words and poor abbreviations due to high levels of intoxication
4- somehow starts a blood feud between families

...to text message ho: A late night girl whom is strickly communicated with via text message. Under no circumstance would an acutal vocal conversation ever take place. Ex: I had to bang out my text message ho last night, kiiiiddd. and Dude, that chick is a text message ho. Strickly text scene.

I think it's sad. Communication with another can't be all bad. I guess it's just how you look at it.