Sunday, December 02, 2007 Sun.star Essay: Catching up By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
A Microsoft article cites how the ever-new technologies, such as mobile phones and texting, affect our culture in different ways.
The Chinese play games on the cell phone while commuting, according to the article. Perhaps there are those who like music from the cell phone, some dream of finally owning a phone that is also a TV set, or something. On the other hand, the Japanese could get particularly bewitched by cell phones in stylish packaging, well decorated and overdone, with creative phone holders.
But the Filipino, he goes crazy texting, period.
Traditionally shy, he shows off his mobile phone by texting and texting until he’s really stuck with texting, he can’t live without it. He’s like his Malaysian neighbor. And it’s not just in Asia, this technological malaise. In a Nestle social research, over 97 percent of females and 92 percent of males in the UK use the cell phone.
But the Filipino, perhaps shy about talking, would rather text than call.
It’s interesting to try and guess how the technology has brought on changes in some aspects of Filipino culture and lifestyle.
Connectedness makes Filipinos happy. In side roads in the city, families hang out together in the streets at sundown after supper for a stroll with neighbors, or a card game among the boys. When this culture of attachment is extended even after the street is empty and through midnight, by text, so much the better for the Filipino.
You go to the mall and stop somewhere to watch people walk by, and you see three, or four, or five young guys and a girl texting away. You sit inside a coffee shop, watch them through the glass window, realizing that there’s no shrugging off the wonder of the technology, both in young and old.
There’s even no getting away from the subject of texting, you just get more knowledgeable or more confused about the text convention, for that’s probably what it is now.
The Microsoft article says the Filipino woman is happy receiving romantic text messages, almost as though these were enough to make her happy. It says further that “over a third of the women from the Philippines prefer a romantic text to chocolates or a card.”
This only means that the text message weighs a little like precious stone to a Filipino woman, and this the men know. Gracious, she truly appreciates small gestures of love in text talk (or txt, or txtspk).
The text goes: k. luv u. wil txt later.
Texting has given up on grammar but has developed its own language to deal with misinterpretations. Besides, culture could work on the absence of tone in text. Polite and respectful, the Filipino texter shows his true gentle character in the effort to be understood.
He uses the Smiley in order to show a light heart.
He texts, gud morning, mam, even if this costs more in addition to the message. But there’s meaning to the greeting that reveals his culture of respect for the elders. And he uses pls, too.
There are those who stop to consider who they’re texting to. If it’s the college teacher to whom the texter will submit a research paper, the text would be in straight English with correct grammar. But if he sends a message to a classmate for a book he’s borrowing, he can text: pls hapit lng here hse. txt lng. drop m lng bok. super bece jud ko. ty.
Texting hasn’t changed much the Filipino texter who adapts easy the way he learns a song. Somehow in his own way, he manages to use with ease the impersonal connection of a cold instrument.
Mobile phone makers have looked for ways to adapt to the lack of enough space for the desired number of characters used, which is about 160 characters or less.
The lesson goes: single letters for words (how r u?), single digits for words (it wud b nice 4 u 2 com), a digit replacing a syllable (c u l8r).
If you’re having a hard time deciphering the text talk in this column, you have a long way to go.
(bird_song2002@hotmail.com)
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