The reading habit may be dying, which is why booksellers wear long faces these days even as they are marketing them in the emerging e-book format for reading devices. But the written word has not lost its primacy yet. Even the Pope understands this as he is all set to reach out to over a billion Catholics on Twitter.
The world is certainly atwitter as the microblogging site has become the quickest-growing medium within the not-so-esoteric world of instant communication through an array of electronic devices that have made geography immaterial. It doesn’t matter whether you are at either pole or in the vast middle of Planet Earth, the fact remains you could be in touch with just about anyone.
Twenty years have rolled by since the first text message was sent out, and in that time it became all the rage in communicating. The SMS, or short message service, has not had such a smooth run in India where arguments are still on about restricting their use to a ceiling of 100/200 a day. Elsewhere, the old-fashioned SMS is said to be losing some ground to even newer media. However, electronically sent text in any form appears to be going strong in cyberspace.