Thursday, October 04, 2007

SMS mania

You wish to vote for the Indian Idol or Sa re gama pa Contest? You wish to voice out your opinion for the potboiler surveys on the news channels? You want to choose a song to be aired on radio? Want to vote for the seven wonders of the world? Just SMS so-and-so at so-and-so. God!! It amazes me how omnipresent and omnipotent SMSing has emerged to be!
What a Superb Money-making Scheme this giant SMS turns out to be!! I hope it does not so happen that a time will come when a person who manages to call an ambulance after having met with an accident gets his request turned down for calling up while he should actually be SMSing!! People consider it such a hep thing to SMS that the media and telecommunication industry is exploiting this weakness to reap huge profits. Just recently, my dad so proudly said that he had SMS'd to vote for TajMahal to be one of the seven wonders of the world! On the way home, whenever he wanted to ensure that I had reached home or I need to be picked up, he used to SMS me saying "Wher r u? " . Well, a person who considered language and semantics so important also is bitten by the SMS-bug , I suppose. En masse influence it turns out to be, if not obliging,one looks out-of -fashion,not hep, not open to new ideas,not in the "in" generation which makes even people who were quite away from such short-cuts get comfortable with it. Well, it takes a lot from me to type 'you' instead of 'u', 'right' instead of 'rite', 'what' instead of 'wat', 'where' instead of 'wher' etc ,the effort although is reserved only for formal write-ups! When I stood against using the shortcuts to keep myself and my language sane, I was teased,suggested,advised to be crisp and follow short-sweet style for which I too budged for all the huge number of SMS conversations that happen,it indeed is tedious if not followed. Thanks to the SMS-magic,no doubt innumerable people escape from getting ridiculed for not having decent language skills. Of late, it's never even thought if the person has a weak grammar or vocabulary, it's presumed that it's the SMS-style of English which in effect, relaxes the need or compulsion to be right in saying what needs to be expressed. Ruin of the language it sure is,me a potential contributor to it. When time means more,everything else seems to have taken a back seat.

K.. if u wud lyk 2 cmt on d post ,do SMS me @ so-n-so!! :P

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very well expressed the problems v (we :) ) r (are :) ) facing!!
Infact whenever i rite a mail to my client, i kept reading the mail twice so that,i dont address him as 'u' instead of "you" ;)... Its tougher to come out of SMS addiction... i wish v cud send a short SMS to clients instead of lenghty mails..:D

-pushpa

~SuCh~ said...

I get ridiculed for using the T9 dictionary.. My sms es get truncated because of it... :P
Having sms conversations can be a pain.. I have done that so many times... But sometimes, especially in boring meetings, they are good time-pass..:)

Ramprasad said...

Yeah very true. I have always wanted to stay away from SMS addiction and have typed the full word. Now I've been bit by the bug:)

The same culture is followed even in chat conversations..

Rashmi Kantharaja said...

@Pushpa,
"i wish v cud send a short SMS to clients instead of lenghty mails..:D" is it? LOL

@~such~
So true, I have experienced the same. Now, I am sailing with the wave to get the SMS thing going more economically and "happening" type.

@ramprasad
SMS bug bites everyone, most certainly.