Cultural Shifts: E-Mail Vs Texting

I'm old enough to remember when having a colour TV in your home meant you were something special, and can still vividly recall the excitement when we got our first. Telephones were pretty much standard household appliances even back then, but my mother lived through that particular revolution. When e-mail first entered my life, it was strictly a work thing, as Vicki and I didn't even have a computer in our house until somewhere in the mid-1990s. Then we cruised through a period where only old people and Luddites didn't have e-mail, to the point where I began to rely upon its asynchronous method of communication as a primary means of keeping in touch with friends and family where I didn't need an immediate response. Instant messaging took that a step further, but generally required both parties to be engaged at the same time (synchronous communication), making it suitable for slightly different scenarios. We all learned fairly easily when to use which.

Now, however, I've run into the divide between those who use e-mail versus those who text. Two different (female) friends of mine have e-mail accounts but rarely check them (often going days, or even weeks, between accesses). Because I'm so accustomed to people who respond to e-mails within minutes or, at worst, hours, this has become a growing source of frustration as my particular model of communication hasn't been fitting well with theirs. Lately I've thought that perhaps I just need to finally break down and buy a cell phone (never owned one; hadn't planned to ever own one) but over this weekend I went looking for alternatives. And I've found something that seems like it may work.

Who knew that it was possible to send e-mails to text message accounts? Well, I certainly didn't, but it seemed like a simple enough feature to offer, conceptually. So I started searching for articles about it. Sure enough, many cell carriers offer (in some cases, free of charge) a service whereby you can send an e-mail to ##########@blahblahblah.com, where the ########## is the cell phone # and the blahblahblah domain name is some variation on the company's regular e-mail domain extension. Different services have different limitations, such as whether they truncate your e-mail down to 150 characters, send multiple ones, or do something else, for example. But the bottom line is that I can now e-mail these texting-focused friends of mine and have some reasonable hope of them seeing it in pseudo-realtime. All for the low upfront cost of a little bit of time spent researching the problem. So maybe I can hold off on buying that iPhone 4, after all!