EOTO Reflection

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    As someone who is very interested in technology and loves all the newest gadgets and gizmos, I enjoyed learning about the backstory behind text messages. With always being 1 text away from a friend or family member it's easy to forget the origin of the text message. The first text message was sent in December of 1992 and read "Merry Christmas" at this time, and for a while after that, SMS could only be 160 characters which reminded me of the old Twitter format, which could only be 140 characters, after a quick Google search I found out that "Twitter began as an SMS text-based service. This limited the original Tweet length to 140 characters (which was partly driven by the 160 character limit of SMS, with 20 characters reserved for commands and usernames)" (Counting characters, 2020). I found this very interesting that I made this connection between the two because I did not know about Twitter's origin. 


    Like any new technology in the '90s and today, the initial growth of SMS was slow. "The average American user sent 0.4 texts per month in 1995." (Mobivity, 2012) Over this time, phones and networks adapted to better accommodate SMS. In 1999, texts were being exchanged between different networks as well, which increased its usefulness. By 2000, the average number of text messages sent in the U.S. increased to 35 a month per person and has grown rapidly since then. 



    Today, 23 billion text messages are sent each day worldwide. The invention and technological innovation of text messages has allowed us to be more efficient, independent, and direct in our interactions with each other.



References

Counting characters | Docs | Twitter Developer. (2020). Retrieved October 20, 2020, from https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/counting-characters

Mobivity. (2012, September 27). A Brief History of Text Messaging. Retrieved October 20, 2020, from https://www.mobivity.com/2012/09/a-brief-history-of-text-messaging

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