I’ve talked about this before (but it was BB*). Last fall I was in England and no one cares about how many minutes they get, just how many text messages they get. It completely blew my mind. Now it was nice, it was quieter on the trains, busses and restaurants. But for not much more they could have actually talked and interacted a little more. It was kind of odd.
If you assume you can count smilies ” :) ” and abbreviations “IMHO” as symbols we’re at stage 8. Maybe symbols should be earlier since they’ve been around a while with e-mail, but it still puts us at 8. While we might have 9 as an option it isn’t completely common yet (if we’ve talking phone photos). I don’t agree with stage 10 but I thought it was very interesting.
So here’s the list (pretty much lifted this from A Blog’s Life.)
Stage 1 The birth of language
Stage 2 Communicating with smoke signals
Stage 3 Communicating with symbols
Stage 4 The written word
Stage 5 Telecommunications
Stage 6 Mobile telecommunications
Stage 7 The texted word
Stage 8 Communicating with symbols
Stage 9 Photo smoke signals
Stage 10 The death of language!
* BB=Before Blogging.
