.:: SMS I love you
My first post after all this time is about a discover I made thanks to Jill's blog.
Treasuremytext is a website that allows you to store SMS from your mobile phone online. They say that the service is free, and it is in fact, but of course you have to pay the cost of a normal SMS for sending it to them (in my case I have to pay the cost of an SMS to England). Does it worth it? With our new hypertech mobiles we have very big memories (I've been months without deleting sms and I still have a lot of free space) and most of them have softwares which allow you to downoload everything on the PC.
Anyway, the interesting thing from my point of you is that at my first year of university I made a project with some other students about the kind of language used in sms, since the goal of the project was a linguistic analysis on a particular kind of text. We created a small database of sms representative of some bands of people (selected by age, sex, level of instruction). The teacher considered our idea very original and it turned out to be a cool project. But of course it was a very small and scholastic one, with narrow perspectives. So the great perspective that I see in a thing like Treasuremytext is that it could represent a huge database of text usable for any kind of sociological or linguistic analysis. It should only have to ask the submitters for some more details (always anonymously) about age, sex and eventually other social details of the writer.
A comment leaved on Jill's post by Luca let me think about another aspect of this service: the chance given us by new technologies of logging almost everything in our life could change our personal memory. And, I dare adding, could switch it in a public memory. Though I think that, if my mother couldn't store an Sms, it's also true that she couldn't neither receive it. We have a lot of things that we can log or store now, but it's true that we also produce a much bigger quantity of "memories". And it's even true that most of our new ways of communicating are fast to disappear ( think about the difference between emails and snail mails: do you keep all the emails you receive? - Me only few. Did your mother used to keep all the mails she received? - Mine most of them). But the shocking thing about blogs and services like Treasuremytext is for me that anyone can read your life. I think are the concept of privacy and public memory to be involved most in this changing.
posted by QueenMab @ 8:33 PM
2 Comments:
thanks for the nice comment.
What I find really fascinating (not only related to new media) is how the privacy problem is underestimated. maybe it is just a false problem. Maybe the "broadcast yourself instinct" is just too strong. How could you explain otherwise people showing their own SMSs on the Internet?
what's the specialization that's leading you far from digital culture studies?
you're right...concerning this, the first sms I read in the log was pornographic (censurated with *** after some minutes)...so clearly a demonstration of our "videor ergo sum" society, as my father likes to define our society, or "broadcast yourself instinct", as you prefer. Looks like we're obsessed by privacy at the point of making such detailed laws about it...and finally what we want is just to exhibit ourselves..but what I like most about internet is that you're free of doing it if you want, you don't have to be important or rich. Maybe little by little this will mitigate the importance we give to visibility. I hope..(..but mother TV and Maria Defilippi maybe are still too powerfull...).
I'm taking a degree in humanities computing (Jill was one of my teachers in Norway), which actually could lead with those subjects (though in Pisa there's no specific teaching), but my dissertation is about lemmatization (esiste questa parola?!?..beh lemmatizzazione) of verbs in Dante's works. My specialization will be in text encoding and electronic editing.
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