Read the following article below and
answer the questions:
TEXT 2
In the mid-’80s, a German engineer
named Friedhelm Hillebrand helped
devise a way for cellphones to send and
receive text messages. Back then, mobile
bandwidth was extremely limited, which
meant that the messages needed to be as
lightweight as possible. The story goes
that Hillebrand experimented with a
variety of greetings and phrases and
concluded, in very German fashion, that
most things that needed saying could be
done so in an economical 160 characters
or fewer. “This is perfectly sufficient,” he
said of his findings. Eventually the
infrastructure improved so that there were
no limits to how much text we could
transmit at once. And by 2007, texting had
surpassed voice calls as the preferred, if
not default, mode of communication.
As most rapid advances in technology
tend to do, this transition inspired a low-
grade, intergenerational moral panic.
Many feared that we would become
asocial creatures, misanthropes who
would rather hide behind the safety of a
screen than face the intimacy of a spoken
conversation. And maybe there’s some
truth in that, but there’s another way of
looking at it. Maybe we didn’t hate talking
—just the way older phone technologies
forced us to talk. Texting freed a
generation from the strictures and
inconvenience (and awkwardness) of
phone calls, while allowing people to be
more loosely and constantly connected.
I thought about this shift recently when
trying to make sense of the rise of
Snapchat, the latest wellspring of
technosocial handwringing. Like texting,
Snapchat flourished amid scarcity, though
of an entirely different kind. We no longer
live in Hillebrand’s era, when there were
hard limits on how much we could say
over text; but words alone can be an
imperfect technology. So much of what we
mean lies not just in what we say, or in the
exact words we choose, but also in the
light that animates our eyes (or doesn’t)
when we deliver them and the sharpness
(or softness) of the tone we use. Text
barely captures even a fraction of that
emotional depth and texture, even when
we can type as much as we want.
Snapchat is just the latest and most well
realized example of the various ways we
are regaining the layers of meaning we
lost when we began digitizing so many
important interactions.
Most efforts to approximate normal
human behavior in software tend to be
creepy or annoying. The oblong gray
bubble that pops up when your
conversation partner is typing (officially
called the “typing awareness indicator”) is
no doubt intended to be helpful, the virtual
version of watching someone inhale and
then part their lips to speak. But it
becomes panic inducing if it appears and
then disappears—an indication that
someone wrote something, then, for any
number of reasons, deleted it. Similarly,
“read” receipts, designed to let you know
that someone opened and read your
message, are perhaps best at letting you
know when you’re being ignored. In a
strange turnof events, texting has evolved
to become almost as awkward as the
phone calls it made obsolete.
In 2012, I calculated that I sent about
7,000 texts a month; now, thanks to the
creeping unwieldiness of phones and the
misfirings of autocorrect, I can barely
manage to peck out half a sentence
before I become aggravated by the effort
and give up. To combat that fatigue, I’ve
turned to newer ways to talk and interact
with friends, primarily voice memos.
These function like a highly evolved
version of voice mail—there’s no
expectation of a return call, or even a
simultaneous conversation. Freed from
that pressure, my friends and I leave one
another memos about episodes of
RuPaul’s Drag Race and Empire, the
themes of Lemonade or even just a
detailed account of a date or run-in with
an ex. The trend is catching on elsewhere:
According to an article on Vice’s website
Motherboard, voice notes have become
so popular in Argentina that they’ve
virtually replaced text messages
altogether.
This is not to say that text is
irredeemable. A significant humanization
of our text interactions happened quietly in
2011, when emoji were introduced as part
of an Apple iOS software update. They
offered a palette of punctuation that
clarified intent. Tacking on emoji like
hearts, skulls, grins and bugged-out eyes
to a short message made it infinitely
easier to confidently project sarcasm,
humor, grief and love across a medium
that had been, until then, emotionally arid.
If you want proof that we see ourselves in
the emoji we use, consider the ever-
present disputes over emoji inclusivity:
Initially, the characters all had the same
skin tone, and even now, the only
“professional” emoji are male.
And though the catalog of emoji has
expanded in response to user demand, it
still struggles to keep up with the
multiplicity of human experiences. As a
result, a new bespoke-emoji economy has
begun to emerge, in apps like Bitmoji,
which let people create personalized
avatars to adorn their text messages. If
our emoji couldn’t become us, we would
become our emoji.
But messages that include little actual
messaging seem to be the wave of the
future, and Snapchat is leading the way.
The app, which allows users to send short
videos and images that disappear after a
short period of time, is intimate by design,
something that sets it apart from its social-
media peers. Most of the “snaps” I send
and receive are tightly framed, with angles
that could be considered unflattering.
They’re low resolution too, the images
speckled with grain. Snapchat does have
filters, but the dumb ones are the most
fun, especially the ones that add a
comically hideous effect—bloating your
face into a red
tomato, or distorting it into an animal
mask.
If we are to believe the theories about
how people want to communicate
nowadays—largely through anesthetized,
hypermediated and impersonal exchanges
—Snapchat’s recent surge in popularity
makes little sense. During the first few
years of Snapchat’s existence, the only
people I knew using the service (beyond
journalists like me who were trying to
understand it) were my youngest relatives,
still in high school and college. And of
course there was the attendant moral
panic: When it first blew up around 2012,
the press seemed to assume it would
primarily be used by horny teenagers
swapping nudes.
If that was ever the case, it has since
expanded. Each time I check the app, I’m
surprised to see who else in my network
has started using the service. My circle
includes every demographic, age and
locale: co-workers who send snaps of
their dogs, friends online sending videos
from their travels. The videos are rarely
elaborate: just a few seconds of my
favorite people’s faces on a large screen,
smiling, or singing, or showing off their
view, before they fade and disappear.
Its entire aesthetic flies in the face of how
most people behave on Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter—as if we’re waiting
to be plucked from obscurity by a talent
agent or model scout. But Snapchat isn’t
the place where you go to be pretty. It’s
the place where you go to be yourself, and
that is made easy thanks to the app’s
inbuilt ephemerality. Away from the fave-
based economies of mainstream social
media, there’s less pressure to be dolled
up, or funny. For all the advances in tech
that let us try on various guises to play
around with who we are, it seems that we
just want new ways to be ourselves. As it
turns out, the mundanity of our regular
lives is the most captivating thing we could
share with one another.
What is the text about? (50-80
words)
Which title would you choose for
it?
How do you think the structure of
the essay is? Which parts do you
think it includes?
Pay attention to the language, is it
formal? Is it informal?
What would you change to make it
sound more formal? Think of lexical
bundles or discourse organizers
common in argumentative essays.
Now, rewrite the text again in a formal
way.
