科學貓科普:手機短信的誕生和落幕,你還在用嗎?
準備感受如此古老的自己吧:第一條短信已經25歲了! 工程師尼爾·帕波沃斯(Neil Papworth)於1992年12月3日發送了第一封短信,
Be prepared to feel ancient -- the first text message is 25 years old. Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS on December 3rd, 1992, when he wrote "merry Christmas" on a computer and sent it to the cellphone of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis. It was a modest start, but it ultimately changed technology and even social norms.
由於手機網路本身(1992年的覆蓋範圍遠遠達不到普遍存在的程度)以及按鍵是給撥號而不是鍵入字母而設計的手機,手機短信(SMS)花了很長時間才得到廣泛採用。
It took a long time for SMS to find widespread adoption, both because of the cellular networks themselves (coverage was far from ubiquitous in 1992) and phones whose buttons revolved around dialing rather than typing. But then the smartphone arrived. In the US alone, the volume of messages surged from 12.5 billion per month in 2006 to 45 billion a year later. By June 2017, there were 781 billion messages passing around in the country. Messaging was suddenly easy, and SMS was ready and waiting to take advantage of that newfound freedom.
毫無疑問,發短信已經影響了多年以來的溝通。發手機短信曾經被認為是罕見、甚至是粗魯的行為,而現在通常是交流的第一選擇:試想現在當有人不發短信而直接打電話給你,
There's little doubt that texting has influenced communication in the years since. Where texting was once seen as a rarity or even rude, it's frequently the first choice for communication -- how often are you annoyed when someone calls you instead of sending a brief message? Accordingly, it's entirely common to see services that are available through SMS, whether it's ordering pizza or getting music recommendations. Twitter's original 140-character limit (which was just lifted in November) was built around SMS' 160-character ceiling to enable tweets in an era before the mobile internet was widely available. The effects of SMS haven't always been positive (they've facilitated spam, for instance), but it's clear there's no going back.
現在的問題是SMS是否有一個健康的長期未來。智慧手機和無處不在的移動互聯網接入的結合導致消息服務和社交網路的爆炸式增長。截至7月份,手機社交軟體WhatsApp本身每天提供了550億條消息(微信大約每天為400億條文字資訊、70億條語音資訊和2億多語音或視頻聊天),