British cellular company Dot Mobile announced last week the launch of a new line of text messages that will be available for students in January 2006.
The text messages will condense classic works such as William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” into text messaging format and syntax as a proposed study aid for high school students.
“Text-messaging, traditionally at the centre of the debate over falling standards of literacy among young people, is set to be re-invented as a valuable learning tool for students of English Literature,” Dot Mobile said in a press release. “The new service has been specifically designed to aid English students in both their choices of books to study and to serve as a valuable revision tool for exams.”
Working with John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English literature at University College London and his students, the mobile service translated the complex plots of such works as William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” and John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” into just a few sentences.
For example, “Paradise Lost” is translated to: “Devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd’off wiv god so corupts man (md by god) wiv apel. Devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind,” Dot Mobile said.
Some feel that this technological advancement is a step backward for today’s students. “This is not fair to either the writer or the reader,” Kevin Williams, assistant professor of communication at MSU, said. “This development would remove you from doing any in-depth scholarly analysis of the work.”
Society has come to treat the written text as sacred, Williams said. There is so much more to discover when a written text is available. The reader can delve into the pages and become engrossed in the language, allowing for a deeper understanding of the work itself.
“People need something that they can sit down and digest at a slower pace. They need to analyze and engage the text,” Williams said. “There is something about having a traditional bound paper book that you can read and reread.”
Others feel that the development of text messaging classics can be treated as a valuable learning tool, not necessarily for analysis of the works, but for study of written communication in society.
“Our language is very new and has been changing constantly since its inception,” Tennyson O’Donnell, assistant professor of English at MSU, said. “Literary texts are a part of the social discourse that influences the beliefs, actions, standards and values of particular societies. If this is the approach to literature, then text messaging versions of Shakespeare would be studied for their function in society instead of solely on aesthetic merit.”
Devon Brenner, assistant professor of reading and language arts at MSU, agrees.
“As society changes, so do our literacies. Hypertexts, the Internet and other new genres change our literacies as well. Our definitions of texts are changing,” she said. “Podcasts, audio books, talk radio, text messages, instant messaging make our lives richer. Which is not to say that I’m satisfied with what and how much people read, but to recognize that the what and how of reading are changing over time.”
Although there are varying opinions regarding the educational value of this new type of text messaging, most agree that this sort of technology cannot replace reading the actual written text.
“There are too many people that actually like to have their copy of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ for this to take over,” Williams said. “People like to be able to flip to a page, touch it, smell it, get their highlighter out and make notes in the margins.”
O’Donnell agrees that this sort of development will never replace traditionally bound books but feels that communication changes over time, and with that change, society must ask new questions.
“In this sense, literature is seen as political and not existing apart from society in an ivory tower,” O’Donnell said. “Professors and students could study the production, reception and function of canonical works transcribed into the genre of text messages.”