SMS

Melville Bell had developed Visible Speech: a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. When the Bells moved to Boston in the 1870s, his son worked as a teacher at a School for the Deaf. At the age of 29 years, the son went on to be the first to receive a patent for his revolutionary invention – the telephone, on this very day in 1876. Alexander Graham Bell had successfully bettered the telegraph.

Over the years the telephone has evolved into becoming a very handy tool as well as an easily available and affordable appliance. However, it is also very true that communication via the phone is getting curt, mechanical and one-sided. The primary intent to help people communicate across a distance is being reduced a ‘telegraph’ way of communication, especially in the case of mobile phones through SMS – short message service.

There are so many of us who use the phone less to talk and use it more to send SMSs. Surely the original intention of Bell’s invention was to bridge the communication gap created by physical distance, but often we receive an SMS even from someone sitting next to us. It is not as if SMS is a bad thing, but it would be better to choose direct talk or a note or a face-to-face encounter as a better way of interpersonal communication. After all, it is said so well that the mechanical is death!

May we BE BETTER at personal connection…

Let SMS be a distant second to direct action!

- Pravin K. Sabnis