With Gordon grumping about in No.10 and Boris clowning around on the streets of London, it’s time the online community took charge and helped to bring a bit of order into our messed-up world. And the biggest danger to society isn’t MRSI or STDs, but the rampant spread of ITMS (Inappropriate Text Messaging Syndrome). The thing is, we can’t get enough of texts; we use them for everything, everywhere, from pub quiz cheating to microblog Tweeting – and so we should. They’re ingenious wordbundles of convenience and pleasure. But all too often we underestimate the power of a humble SMS, get bold and busy with our fingers, and wreak merry havoc before we’ve realised what we’ve done.

Ladies and gentleman of the social media, I will highlight just a couple of areas where unrestrained ITMS is ruining our lives:

·        Business. There are serious hazards here, something the Manchester-based Accident Group learned to their peril when they sacked some 3,000 loyal staff via SMS and were subsequently held liable for compensation by the irate employees. Are kisses on the end of work-related texts always inappropriate? Should you always keep a separate work phone to prevent drunken SMS career suicide? We need to decide!

·        Relationships. Ah, David, your sneaky text sex with the bacon-loving Loos almost caused the downfall of Beckingham Palace – and most of us are becoming increasingly prone to ‘accidentally’ checking our lover’s Outboxes. Is it ever justified? Is it too easy to ‘harmlessly flirt’ on SMS? Are ‘love’, ‘xxxx’ and xoxoxox’ used so indiscriminately in texts nowadays that the value of affection is being debased?

Usually an advocate of all that is free speech, free love and free text, I’ve decided that enough is enough. We need to pool our experiences and work out some rules. So, bloggers, forum members, online opinion-leaders of every kind, I call you to build your own Text Manifesto: your top 20 dos and donts of Modern Text Etiquette. We’re saving lives here, people. Get to work.

Tags: , Editorial, itms, SMS, texts, Twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Texting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.