SMS SCKS

CAPE TIMES, 27 DECEMBER 2002

CAN SOMEONE TELL me – what is the deal with group SMSing? Really, it is beginning to annoy me.

It used to be an irksome but necessary chore of Christmastime – if you were one who went in for such things as Christmastime chores – to handwrite warm festive cards to friends and relatives and business acquaintances and people you met on holiday, and post them off in good time to arrive before Christmas day.

For the most part, admittedly, the cards were simply watercolours of robins or snowmen or apple-cheeked children deporting themselves like kittens with balls of wool, inside which you had scrawled “With love to the whole family” or some similar effusion of the heart in spidery handwriting with a blue ballpoint pen. People would line their cards on the mantlepiece or mount them on lengths of string and look at them with bloody-minded satisfaction on Christmas Eve as they sipped their brandy and waited for the kids to fall asleep. Christmas cards were a minimal exercise in civility.

To send a Christmas card, you needed actually to buy the object, write in it, envelope it, lick the flap, stamp, address and finally post it. It was an exercise that demanded an investment of time and effort. You may not especially like someone or choose to spend time with them, but the act of sending them a Christmas card was a way of expressing that they were not beyond the pale of your attention – that you still acknowledged them as being in the world and to an extent in your life. It was a kind of covenant between people; to be on someone’s Christmas card list meant that – regardless of the state of relations between you – in their eyes you still qualified as a human being deserving of recognition, even if only once a year.

This is no longer the case. Not only is the Christmas card – with its handwriting and its personalised name and address – scarcely sent any longer, but increasingly it is being replaced by the group SMS. Have you received a group SMS? On Christmas Eve and morn my telephone was athrob with them. This does not mean that I am popular and have many friends – this just means that my number is stored in an unconscionable number of cellphones.

It is not flattering to receive a group SMS saying “Wishing you a Christmas of love, light and hipness”, and not merely because no one using the word “hipness” is a friend of mine. It is not flattering because it is not especially being sent to you. It is simultaneously being sent to everyone else in that person’s cellphone, including their dermatologist, their tax guy and the AA emergency rescue operator. I received warm SMSes solicitous about my Yule season and the year ahead from people I could scarcely remember meeting. I received one from the ex-girlfriend of a one-time friend; I received one from a man in the music industry who is in the process of trying to sue me; and one from a local soap actress who has only ever previously used my number to send me threatening messages and late-night drunken promises to have my legs broken. Very few of the people who sent me Christmas wishes would have actively chosen to send me Christmas wishes, and that is hardly the thinking behind the Christmas wish, I wouldn’t think.

Ah well, that’s folks for you. Say, while I’m on the subject, how was your Christmas? Yes, yours. I do hope it was good. Yes, I do. Yes, I’m talking to you.