Japanese schoolgirls have stopped writing text messages with their phone keypads and started writing out notes on paper by hand, taking photos of them and sending the photos as picture messages. (from here, reported on SmartMobs).
In an essay called Light Touches* (on Test and also vodaphone's reciever) Matt Locke compares text messages and vernacular photography, vernacular photography being family albums, wedding snaps and so on, the sort of photos that capture our family and friends rather than moments of great national import, and that get their charge from what they remind us about who knew us and how they were tied to us.
Locke describes how text messages and this kind of photography share a sort of poetry that comes from being so fleeting. Very few of them will outlast the people whose relationships were their subject - my friend Lisa used to buy boxes of old family photos from car boot sales - and often they'll have a much shorter life than that, "created, received and destroyed by a series of light touches - finger presses on a key pad, the vibration announcing its arrival, and the final press of the delete key."
Of course maybe it's just quicker for Japanese schoolgirls to scribble a note, photo it and send it. But maybe they also sometimes spend a long time carefully drawing and decorating the messages. The same article reports that when they do use their keypads they use schoolgirl-text language that takes longer to write than standard Japanese, is impossible for outsiders to understand and makes their messages look more "artistic".
Painstakingly handmade picture messages like this must be meant to get their value from being turned into something so fragile and easy to wipe out as a mobile phone message. To send one says something like "This took me hours, it's yours until the final press of the delete key."
It's sometimes suggested that mobile phones should have "treasure boxes" to store this kind of important message, maybe on removable media cards, but making it easy to store the messages in this way at the press of a key might give them less value rather than more. It would certainly take away the poetry, and you'll be able to buy boxes of them at car boot sales in 50 years time.
Whatever these messages mean, it's hard not to smile at the wonderfulness of it. Give enough people enough access to enough tools and enough connections and they'll come up with something fantastic that nobody ever expected.
What's also wonderful is that the story is on some sort of Japanese business report website. After a long series of amazing observations it ends with a cheerful " And of course this means increased profits for Japan's telcos." ;)
*Light Touches is in part about my book but don't let that put you off, it's a great essay.
