(keitai-l) Re: Long shot, but is short messaging a thousand years old?

From: Nick May <nick_at_kyushu.com>
Date: 08/10/03
Message-Id: <9FC257F6-CADB-11D7-98CC-00039377A93A@kyushu.com>
No - "short messaging" is not a thousand years old.

But people have been sending messages to each other which happen to be 
- oh - not very long - and waiting impatiently for a response since the 
cavemen. People writing daily letters to each other are fairly common 
in Jane Austen, and Shakespeare is full of messengers being dispatched 
and met. Nothing particularly Japanese about it.

The essential feature of  modern short messaging lies not so much in 
message length (although that is relevant for the immediacy and focus 
it permits) as to its relative "instantaneity" and the sense of a 
shared presence, and present, that that instantaneity permits to be 
created.

You may respond that instantaneity, (like "short") is a relative term, 
and that when an Elizabethan lady and her lover exchanged messages they 
two shared a presence, and a present (temporal). But while I would half 
agree, I still think that that is different in kind - one deals with 
instant messages in parallel to other daily concerns, an additional 
stream of contact that runs in parallel to, say - talking to friends. 
The whole phenomenology of instant and short messaging is different...

Nick


On Sunday, August 10, 2003, at 10:40 AM, keitai-l@appelsiini.net wrote:

> Hm, this is maybe a long shot, but pretty much everybody at this time
> and with enough status/money/education at hand permanently exchanged
> "short messages" with each other.
>
> Basically the book is full of descriptions that somebody writes a
> short message, often a poem, and sends it via messenger to his
> friends/lovers/acquaintances and waits for a reply. It seems like it
> was a fashion to send more short messages than long letters and
> always a quick reply was expected.
>
> What else do I know about Japanese history, but this all sounds that
> some things never really changed...short (Keitai) messages (eg: email)
> via messenger (eg: ISP/mobile ISP) awaiting a quick reply are a
> commonplace these days.
Received on Sun Aug 10 05:43:55 2003