Administrative Law

Of interest to all libraries, especially those that offer txting reference service. The book reviewed below also has a lengthy glossary and appendices showing txting abbreviations.

Txting: The gr8 db8 by David Crystal (Oxford University Press: Sept 2009)

Review by Karen Ives*

Text, text, text?kids everywhere are glued to their cell phones, texting away, a whole generation speaking with their thumbs. Exasperated parents have often complained about the behaviors of their cell phone-happy offspring, but is there really that much to fuss about? No, says David Crystal. In his new book, Txting: The gr8 db8, he provides an excellent resource for those curious to understand the real story behind texting.

David Crystal, with eloquence and wit, provides information about the new communication revolution born out of cell phone texting. His book is organized in an easy-to-follow structure, and he begins in his first chapter by giving a brief and relatively unknown account of the history of texting, explaining how pervasive it?s become. From here, he launches into a series of questions, answered in a chapter, to give a more complete understanding of the texting phenomenon.

While some of his descriptions may not appeal to the public at large, particularly his discussion on distinctive features, it does prove interesting reading, especially to people interested in how this new communicative pattern functions. Occasionally, the structure gets away from the author, and some answers, for example, to why people text can be found in other sections of the book. However, the author makes up for occasionally rocky structure through his charming voice.  Overall, however, he takes a rather complicated linguistic subject and makes it palatable to the general public.

Texting is an evolving process, one that changes so that analysts can never quite pin it down. A book concerning texting always has the risk of being out-of-date by the time it hits the bookshelves. However, while some of the information in the book is necessarily antiquated, the ideas and theories extracted from the data remain pertinent. The book offers a great deal of information about this social phenomenon, and the examples Crystal provides constructs one of the more comprehensive views possible of texting.

While Crystal firmly places himself on the pro-texting side of the debate, I appreciate his ability to also clearly present the dangers of texting. While he agrees that texting has opened up a new mode of creativity and self-reporting, he also explains that there are social and physiological repercussions of texting that may not be so positive. In this way, the book helps to give both sides of the debate, and leave it to his readers to make a decision for themselves.

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*Karen Ives is a rhetoric masters student in Carnegie Mellon University's English department, specializing in computer mediated communication.