How would life be different without mobile phones?
Well for one thing, Tiger Woods would be $750 million richer and a much happier man. He would also still be a sponsor for AT&T (wait – maybe not if there are no mobile phones in this hypothetical scenario).
For those of you who keep up to date with celebrity scandals you’ll know that text messaging played a key role in how his wife discovered his extra-marital affair(s), a catastrophe that made headlines for months thereafter.
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| Source: NYDailyNews,com |
Tiger Woods came home one night and warned his wife, Elin Nordegren, that the National Enquirer was about to run a story on an alleged love affair between him and “nightclub manager” Rachel Uchitel. He claimed the rumor was entirely false and even got the two women to talk on the phone for half an hour so Rachel could convince Elin that their relationship was strictly platonic.
Doubt trickling in her mind, Elin impersonated her husband by sending a few text messages to Rachel using her husband’s phone. Her doubts immediately confirmed, she resumed confrontation. Tiger, in a wild panick, sent another text to Uchitel to warn her that his wife had found out. Of course Elin also discovered this text message, and in a moment that I like to call the “tipping point”, she proceeded to chase the man out of the house with a golf club.
Oh text messaging, how dangerous thou can be.
According to a New York Times article published at the end of last year, text messages are dubbed the new lipstick on the collar. Divorce lawyers noticed a huge increase last year in cases where a cheated spouse used text messages as proof their partner had strayed.
The American Bar Association even began offering seminars for divorce lawyers on how to use electronic evidence such as text messages and social networks in proving a case.
If you think that when you delete a text message it disappears forever, think again. It can sometimes remain on the sender or receiver’s phone, and telecommunication companies store deleted messages anywhere from days to as long as several weeks. Even if the content of text messages cannot be retrieved, mobile carriers can be subpoenaed to provide records of text messages: when they were sent and received, from what and to what numbers.
In Tiger’s case it was bad luck that many of his mistresses saved his text messages, which they then decided to release in public causing further kerfuffle and embarrassment for the champion golfer.
In the spirit of carpe diem, like with many celebrity defamations, companies capitalized on Tiger Woods’ misfortune. One to note in particular was TigerText, a mobile application which emulates text messaging. It doesn’t actually use SMS, but it looks and feels like the real thing, with one special caveat: the messages are stored on a separate server instead of the mobile carriers’ ones. This way, the sender can choose to delete the message at any time and they can even set the messages on “Delete on Read”, where messages are deleted as as soon as the recipient reads them.
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| Source: http://tigertext.com |
However, there is one major drawback to this “too good to be true” app: both users have to download the TigerText application in order to communicate. Oh well, at least it generated a few laughs at the expense of revenue.
It’s hard to come by actual statistics as to as how often text messaging is used as evidence or cited in divorce cases. In 2008, a UK release from law firm Wooley & Co. said that 11% of cases cited technology such as the internet and text messaging as a contributing factor, and that number was growing. A more recent survey conducted by Divorce-Online.com on over 5,000 attorneys revealed that Facebook was mentioned in 20% of all divorce cases. This provides a vague idea to the frequency of “text messaging divorces”, and one can only imagine the larger occurrence of “text messaging break-ups”.
Not only are text messages being used during divorce proceedings, it can actually be used to file for divorce in some countries. Under Islamic law, men are allowed to divorce their wives by saying (or writing) the word “talaq” (“I divorce you”) three times. In 2003, Malaysia permitted the use of text messaging as a form of writing and other countries have since followed suit. What’s next – Facebook wall divorces?
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| Source: religiouswatch.com |
It’s not just Tiger Woods though, many celebrity divorces and break-ups have involved text messaging. For example there was the Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook divorce fiasco and the case of the Detroit Mayor who was caught sending 14,000 flirty text messages to his former chief of staff. Even Britney Spears dumped Kevin Ferderline via SMS back in 2006.
It might seem like text messaging or Facebook is encouraging this behavior, but you can’t just blame it on the technology. One could easily argue that cheaters will always be cheaters, technology or no technology, as humans have found ways to embark on affairs since the beginning of time. However, due to the increased ease of personal communication, there is no doubt that it has become a facilitating factor.
There’s also the fact that it’s a very (seemingly) discreet and innocent way to communicate which undermines the guilty conscience, something that might have detered such behavior in the past. After all, you’re not actually “seeing” the person, you’re not actually “touching” the person, and those words never actually came out of your mouth – so it doesn’t count, right?
Long story short, new technology is allowing people to stay in touch but it’s also helping them to stray. One could debate ad nauseum whether the social/relationship benefits of the technology outweigh the negatives. There are many cases where cell phones have saved a person’s life, and there are cases where perhaps it actually helped two soulmates reunite. Maybe someone was too shy to talk to their object of affection, so they decided in lieu to text message and discovered their feelings were mutual.
Regardless of which side you stand on, the point is it doesn’t matter. Technology is advancing, and social norms and behaviors will evolve with it. We’re currently in a transition period where half are accustomed and think “yeah, that’s normal” while the other half stand back and think “that is so weird”.
Eventually, it will be normal for all.
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| Source: nerdnirvana.org |
