I got an email the other day from a Facebook ‘friend’ with the message simply “becum a fan” (sic). Now for those of you not initiated into the Facebook world, what this means is ‘I have a Facebook page about my art and would you like to join as a ‘Fan’ and be updated regularly on my art?’. Ok, so “becum a fan” is more to the point, and I did understand what the artist wanted me to do, but it didn’t exactly inspire me to rush over to her page and join up as a fan!
Now I know I was not born into the text generation (although I have embraced it fully), and I know I don’t really get the hang of the fact that the need to communicate is seen as more important than the means of communicating. But my gripe is that there is still room there for a few extra words before you get writers cramp!
I also had one artist who, after receiving an email from me following a mail-out to my mailing list, replied simply “I am not interested in yr service”. No “Hi there Emma, thanks for your email but I’m not really interested at the moment”. I replied to her with a nice reply asking her if she would prefer that I unsubscribed her from the mailing list to which she replied “Yeh unsubscribe me”. Now this, dear reader, is someone I have transacted business with, so we are not strangers, and I am not sending her unsolicited junk mail. But sadly many in the SMS Txt World do not rate highly using a few extra words to oil the wheels of sociability.
Maybe I’m just too old to understand (!) but I like the sentances I write to someone to leave them feeling that they have had a positive interaction with me, so I’ll carry on throwing in those few extra words of pleasantness because these little things make a big difference to me.
What do you think about SMS Txt Speak? Good / Bad / Indifferent?
