R U ready 4 Progress? ;] Wht tht txt is rly saying.

TOPIC: Progress

SOURCE: Changes in monetary growth as well as the cultural implications of money (and other manifestations of wealth) are described on pages 59-66 of RR.

RELATION: According to Robbins, “every culture has a distinct material symbol or activity that defines for its members what is most important in life, what is needed for well-being and happiness” (59), which is true for our own culture, as demonstrated in the way that obsession with new cell phones and the new forms of communication that that allows suggests a shift in the “distinct symbol or activity” our culture has come to value.

DESCRIPTION: In paying closer attention to the multitude of text messages I receive on a daily basis from an assortment of people, with whom I am associated either casually or more professionally, I figured there was more to each message than the actual content of the text. Each message I receive tends to be different than each other in the way it is formed, both in sentence structure and word choice/spelling. I can almost immediately guess the author of a text before I have read who sent it. That being said, the text messages which called my attention for purposes of observation were those which did not follow conventional standards of language composition and spelling of words. I began to notice which of my friends tended not to care that all vowels would be placed in the proper place, safely embedded in a complete sentence, marked by its initial capital letter (or any other necessary uppercase characters), and ended in some way by a mark of punctuation. These differences a few years ago might have come down to the fact that some phones possessed a more advanced technology and could therefore craft a complete sentence with more ease; however, nowadays, it seems that anyone who is texting me has an even fancier phone than me, speaking also to the state of our culture in terms of a previously luxurious item, the SmartPhone, having made its way into the standard way of things. A few years ago, this would have meant that we had all “made it” for ourselves, but today it is deemed usual. Also, in that respect, it was interesting to me to start to observe who insisted on doing what when it came to writing a text message, especially because some took great time to write eloquently when others seemed not to care about the conventions of language at all.

COMMENTARY/ANALYSIS: This study of the way that people write and send text messages is just a piece of a much larger anthropological case study—the use and function of language itself and the way that our different mediums of technology have affected our choices in communication. And as I took a look at the text messages and other written media of communication in my own life, it became apparent that a lot of the motivation behind crafting a well-written text message has to do with what the recipient of that message would think of the message upon reading it. I, for example, noticed that a text message from a student in one of my classes with whom I rarely speak outside of an educational setting, would take greater care not to allow errors or any hiccoughs in his/her writing (after all, we are working together in classes, aiming for that same high mark). And the same principle seemed to apply to an email from a teacher. I guarantee Professor so-and-so proofread that message before pressing SEND, and it wasn’t just because that same person is a part of the English Department. In addition, I have noticed that certain friends would not have a problem texting another one of our friends using the informal and often incorrect “text-speak” while that same friend has made a point to tell me that the messages I receive are formed with care for the very fact that I am an English major, meaning I would “know the difference”. To me, this consideration for what might “offend” others about the messages we send them—in the same way that simply sending a message at all to a person other than the one sitting across the table and demanding full attention—can be explained by the fact that our culture is what we have allowed it to become, with the responsibility to assign and ascribe meaning in order to make experience matter more to us as people and then to work to “recognize the meanings we impose on our experiences” (RR page 22).