ABSTRACT
In 2000, for the first time ever, the tradition of Valentine’s cards came under serious threat. Short text messages (known as SMS, originally coined from ‘short message service’) in telegraph style on mobile phones – ‘I LUV U’ – have, reportedly, outnumbered twenty-three million hand-written traditional Valentine’s cards (VirginMobile 2000).While phone companies rejoiced at the news and declared a new age of virtual romance to have begun, conservative forces saw culture and literacy at bay. One question to be pursued in this chapter is whether these new means of communication really harm literacy and the development of communicative competence or whether media like email and SMS trigger or foster new ways of communication.
