“You know the kind of situation. You’re at the office and your teenager and her cell phone are out there somewhere. You need to know what she’s up to, but you don’t really want all your cubicle neighbors to listen in on a phone conversation. You can simply sit at your computer, send a text message to your child using Yahoo! Mail, and receive an immediate response.”
From Yahoo Mail Help, Using Text Messaging: What is Text Messaging in Yahoo Mail?
http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/cg/mail/cg_text1.html
I was originally going to use this snippet for my quote on text and how it has evolved, but think that it fits even better with our understanding of technology. The following blurb is from Yahoo Mail’s help section on using text messaging. I find it very interesting that the example they’ve given is so obviously geared to adult/older users of their service. It’s as if they’ve acknowledged that A: they don’t need to give an explanation of what text messaging is to anyone under 35, and/or B: that no younger user of this service would even bother to read such an explanation.
Brian Farrell
