The Day the Texting Died

T-Mobile's services have been failing tonight. I discovered this when someone called me and told me that they were having trouble texting me. I then tried to send a text and it bounced back. Then, I tried to call T-Mobile customer support to find out if the problem was with my network. When I didn't get an answer (all agents busy, don't even bother hanging on, call back later), I knew it wasn't just me. I then googled T-Mobile news and got a story, posted within the previous 30 minutes, that T-Mobile was having massive outages. Kinda neat how I was able to find out how big the problem was so quickly.

Then, I went over to twitter (the news article in pcmag mentioned outraged phone users taking to twitter to register their disgust w/ tmobile). Indeed, it was clogged with complaints about T-Mobile. My first reaction was laughter. There was something that just struck me as funny about how upset people were about losing texting service. It was the kind of exaggerated outrage that pervades online fora (LOTS OF CAPS, EXPLETIVES, AND EXXXCLAMATION POINTS, DAMMITT!!!!!!). Maybe I felt entitled to laugh at this outrage (or self-parodying fake outrage (fauxtrage?)) b/c I was in the same boat as them. For me, it was a comically minor inconvenience, one that, frankly, prevented me from being distracted by getting into a text conversation (though here I am, avoiding my work by blogging, so maybe the outage didn't help my productivity after all).

Then I checked myself. It would be bad to laugh about a total failure of telephone lines. Phone lines are used by emergency units to save people's lives. While I know that it wasn't everyone who lost texting capabilities (I guess some lost voice, some lost both), it got me to thinking about what it would mean for lots of people to lose the ability to text for a night. Would there be anything seriously bad about that?

It got me to thinking about the overall character of texting. Is there really anything serious about it? There's the hyper-coordination, so an outage might mean a bunch of people would get slightly lost or be slightly late, and get ticked off at one another. I suppose it is possible that if someone didn't know about the outage and was waiting for a call or a text, they might think that the other person was ignoring them, causing stress in the relationship (maybe even the end of a (probably already tenuous) relationship?). Imagine that happening to thousands of people at once.

But really, I feel like the overall character (aside from coordination) of texting is joking, flirting, and gossiping. What would it mean to lose that for a night? One could study this in the way that Berelson (1962) studied what it meant to live without the newspaper for awhile back in the day. Maybe it'll be a nice moment of self-reflection for people. That's what its been for me.