Over at IABC Cafe, Todd Hattori made a sort of odd post about an interesting subject: the use of text messages in business in Asia.
He starts off quite normally describing how he came across the phenomenon at an IABC event in the Philippines, his amazement at the fact of it and the explanations given to him about it by local colleagues.
His "amazement" rather rubbed me up the wrong way, along with his final two paragraphs:
So, I’m curious … I’m a fairly vocal critic of e-mail because very few people use it correctly … shouldn’t we be defining proper use rules for texting before it, like e-mail, gets out of control?
I fear the day when I have to manage the hundreds of e-mails that I receive each day AND endless, intrusive text messages. To add to my fear, my company is getting ready to implement instant messaging. Short of turning off my phone and computer, have any best practices emerged?
Fortunately, I didn't have time to comment or blog about it until now and Kristen Sukalac (who blogs at PR Conversations) weighed in with a great comment, covering some of the reasons why the text message is a useful medium (even if it hasn't caught on in the US thanks to the behaviour of the phone companies there) and I would urge you to go and read the comment in full.
What I would add is three things:
1) All the downsides that Todd seems to see with texting are already in force for a lot of people outside Asia through the medium of the "Crackberry." Push email is largely just text messages with a few extra bells and whistles. This isn't a new problem and we're not at some 'tipping point' where we can stem the tide of rudeness and time wasting from this medium before it gets started. We're already living in the middle of it.
2) The "disbelief" that a particular technology can be used for business communication was prompted in this case by travelling to another continent. However, one can see similar reactions to new technologies used by younger generations right at home. Social networking springs to mind. Not to pick on Todd, but it worries me quite often how few "professional communicators" are open-minded about different ways to get a message across.
3) Most importantly, Kristen makes a key cultural point at the end of her comment:
Text messaging has another appeal: its simplified, pidgeon version of English is much easier to master and to use across diverse groups of non-native English speakers.
This is to my mind, a key point. There's a clear level of discomfort in "professional communicators" with "text speak" and the varied informal ways people type out emails and IMs. This preference for clarity, formality and well, beauty in language is certainly admirable and just about justifiable amongst a homogenous set of native speakers.
However, as soon as you're communicating in English with a set of people for whom it is their second language, you're not talking to people who have any investment in the ways you have been taught to make things clear, to be formal or even well expressed. It should not surprise then if they find a simplified, constrained version of the language more useful. And it's worth remembering that not only when you read (as Todd was doing) some of their communications between themselves, but also when you sit down to communicate with them too.
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