Texting As a Distraction

There is no doubt that texting is a very distracting thing, especially when we should be concentrating on something more important. Since texting is not limited to computers, people often text while on the go, and this can lead to some pretty horrific outcomes.
Texting while driving is a particularly huge problem. Since almost everyone who own a mobile phone carries it around everywhere with them, a lot of people end up feeling the urge to use it while behind the wheel. According to a 2011 study done in the United States of America and Europe, "distraction" was reported as being a factor in nearly one in five crashes in which someone was injured. It has been proven that you cannot concentrate on both texting someone and driving safely at the same time, yet drivers still use their mobile phones, leading to crashes injuries and sometimes deaths. The problem was found to be worse in the United States where one-third of drivers admitted to texting while driving, compared to just 15 percent of drivers from Spain. Many car manufacturing companies are trying to deal with this problem by allowing drivers to use Bluetooth to make calls, so that they don't have to take their eyes off the road, but his doesn't solve the texting problem.
Texting is also known to be a huge distraction for students who are studying or doing homework. Many people think that they can multitask well, so texting while studying is not a problem. But in fact, - as a study done by Student Science confirmed - nobody can perform better on a test, or remember information better, while texting someone when studying, than if not texting, regardless of how good they think they are at multitasking. So in most cases, students should try to keep their phones out of sight, and on silent when studying. Out of sight, out of mind.

Sources:

https://student.societyforscience.org/article/studying-don%E2%80%99t-answer-text

The Popularity of Texting

Mobile phones have become one of the most widely used form of communication amongst humans in the last few years, and for good reason. They're fast, convenient and relatively cheap. Texting in particular, has become the preferred way for many people, of contacting someone via a mobile phone. A text is more relaxed than a phone call, or face to face conversation. You can talk at whatever pace you want, be that ten texts a minute or just one text a minute. And also, texting completely gets rid of the dreaded and infamous awkward silence that can often come with conversation, which makes it the go-to way of contacting someone who you're not too close with.

According to a survey conducted by the PewResearch Centre in 2012, texting is hugely popular not only in wealthy countries, but also developing ones. Contrary to what you might expect, it was found that texting is actually most common in countries such as Indonesia, where 96% of cell phone users said they regularly texted, Kenya where 89% said the same, and Lebanon with 87%. In more developed countries, such as the US (67%), and Germany (56%), texting was less popular due to  easy access to an internet connection. The internet allows people to communicate in more ways than regular texting, such as social media, email and most importantly, apps.

Apps such as Viber and WhatsApp have brought a decline in the popularity of traditional SMS texting in developed countries by removing the "relatively cheap" aspect of texting, and replacing it with "COMPLETELY FREE!". In 2014, WhatsApp reported that it usually handles about 30 billion messages everyday, compared to the 20 billion SMS sent everyday. Mobile operators have tried to compete with this new phenomenon by slashing their prices, and introducing deals such as free texts on the weekends or free texts to anyone using the same mobile operator as you. But why would you bother going through the hassle, when you and your friends can just download Viber in a few seconds and never have to worry about paying a dime? And with more and more apps like Snapchat and Facebook Messenger hopping on the free texts bandwagon, and becoming hugely popular every year, it is quite likely that we could see the downfall of traditional SMS texting over the next few decades.  

Sources:
http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/12/20/global-digital-communication-texting-social-networking-popular-worldwide/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11340321/WhatsApp-overtakes-text-messages.html

Text Slang

Along with revolutionising the way that we communicate with each other, texting has also had a huge impact on the language that we use when we communicate. Over the years, 'texters' have developed their own unique dialect of English, that uses both numbers and letters when typing certain words. These words started out simply as abbreviations for longer words that people simply weren't bothered to type out. Words like '2moro', 'L8R' and 'GR8'. These were simply invented to save time.

Eventually, texters became even more lazy, and began to develop acronyms for commonly used phrases. Be Right Back became BRB. Talk To You Later became TTYL. Oh My God became OMG. And who could forget LOL. Most of these phrases were used extremely commonly not only in texting, but all over the internet, in chat rooms, social media and email.
But in more recent years, there's been a shift in the usage of texting slang. Acronyms like BFF, TTYL, IDK and especially LOL, have escaped our computer screens and found there way into normal everyday conversation. Personally, I think it's incredibly annoying, but I have heard people in real life conversation, replacing natural laughter with "LOLOLOLOLOL". Other words and acronyms that are no longer confined to text messages include noob, FTW and JK. It's only a matter of time before it becomes a social norm to say "ROFLLMAO" out loud (Laughing Out Loud Rolling On The Floor Laughing My A** Off)  

Sources:

http://www.netlingo.com/top50/popular-text-terms.php

Emoticons Around The World

Another new innovation that texting has brought to the way we communicate, is the emoticon. Emoticons are small sequences of keyboard symbols which are used to convey the writer's emotions, or to convey the tone or mood of a text by making a small face on the screen. They've become very popular, but interestingly enough, the way that we write emoticons in our texts varies hugely around the world.
In the Western world, we write emoticons using the Latin alphabet, keyboard symbols and with the face rotated sideways. :) conveys happiness. :( conveys sadness. :D conveys a big smile etc...  Some emoticons use a clever combination of these things to convey specific actions or emotions. ;) shows someone winking. >:( shows a very angry person. :p shows someone sticking their tongue out. But in other countries where English is not the first language, or where the Latin alphabet in not used, texters have still developed unique and interesting emoticons using their own style and alphabet.
The most popular Eastern style emoticon is the Japanese style. These emoticons are not rotated sideways and usually look something like this. (-_-)  >.<  o_O. While the Japanese style uses mostly keyboard symbols to write emoticons, some other countries have developed emoticons using different alphabets altogether. In Korea, emoticons are written using the Korean Hangul alphabet, and like the Japanese style, the faces are not rotated sideways. Common examples look like this.  ㅇㅅㅇ, ㅇㅂㅇ, ㅇㅁㅇ and -ㅅ-. Like Western emoticons, a mixture of keyboard symbols and the alphabet is used in emoticons. For example,  'ㅅ', "ㅅ", 'ㅂ' and 'ㅇ'. 
As I was surprised to find out, even the Arabic alphabet can create a huge range of unique emoticons when combined with keyboard symbols.

ذ_د   ج_ج   ة_ة   ؤ_و   د_د   يـ_يـ  و_و  جـ_جـ  هـ_هـ  ب_ب  ن_ن  سو_و

Sources:

http://www.gomotes.com/emoticon-dictionary/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon

How Texting Works

The popularity of texting has sky rocketed in the past few years. Texting has become the most popular way that young people all over the world communicate with each other, and it has also started to be used more often by adults and older people. But how does texting actually work?


Texting, also known as Short Messaging Service (SMS), is a method of communication which involves sending text to and from different mobile phones. Phones are always sending and receiving information from cell phone towers through pathways called control channels, even when they're not being used. Depending on the location of your phone, it will communicate with different towers, and can change between those towers as you move around a city, country or even the world. If your phone cannot communicate with a tower, it is said to have no signal, and it cannot send or receive texts or calls until it finds a signal again.


When you send a text message to a friend, the message is first sent through a control channel to your closest cell phone tower. The tower then sends this message to the SMS Centre. The SMSC finds out who you are sending the message to, and then sends it to the closest cell phone tower to that location. That tower then sends it to your friend's phone as a small packet of data, through a control channel. In this entire process, the job of the SMS is to format the message in a way that it can be sent to and from the cell phone towers and then to your friend's phone. The SMS also sends information about the text message, such as the length of the message, its destination and the time it was sent

Introduction

Hi. My name is Danial Ahmed and this is my blog about The Geography of Texting