Love messaging: mobile phone txting seen through the lens of tanka poetry

Abstract

The article examines the nature of mobile phone text messaging, or 'txting', in the context of a discourse of love. It draws links between the txt message and the much older, revered form of love messaging, Japanese tanka poetry. In cutting across both a historical and technological divide, it seeks to elucidate a more subtle understanding of how text messaging — from a literary perspective — plays its part in amorous exchange and argues how it has the capacity to enable individuals to affirm their own private thoughts, feelings and anxieties. Taking a cue from Michel Foucault's late work, concerned with the philosophical precept of 'care of the self', the article argues that these differing forms of exchange — as 'tender' technologies of the self and inter-subjectivity — go beyond any one medium or age of media. Aspects of our relationships are worked out in the silent confines of being alone with text and, in the case today, with text messaging, making for the potential of a new poetics of time and space. While we cannot free ourselves from the lover's code or discourse, there is the potential for an affirmation of our part in its production, which prompts a question about how we might go on to research the currently missing archive of text messaging.

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ORCID for Sunil Manghani: orcid.org/0000-0001-6406-7456

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