July 5, 2000

Manila's Talk of the Town Is Text Messaging

By WAYNE ARNOLD

ANILA, Philippines -- Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone.

"There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back."

	Aaron Favila for The New York Times
	Two Manila students sent text messages last month while taking a break, or maybe, given the volume of "texting," what they did between messages was their break.

"Texting"? Yes, texting -- as in exchanging short typed messages over a cell phone.

All over the Philippines, a verb has been born, and Filipinos use it whether they are speaking English or Tagalog.

Sending e-mail on mobile phones, has also taken off in richer parts of the world: Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and in Japan and other East Asian countries, particularly among teen-agers. But in the Philippines, where incomes are far lower, it is even more popular. And it has spawned an entire subculture, complete with its own vocabulary, etiquette and tactical uses. It has become particularly popular here, in large part because text messaging is cheap while traditional telephone service is spotty and Internet access by computer is expensive.

"It's evolved into something similar to chatting on the Internet," said Majidi John Bola, a 32-year-old company manager, as he sat poking away at his mobile phone at a Starbucks in Manila's business district.

The difference is that while chat-room denizens sit in contemplative isolation, glued to computer screens, in the Philippines the "texters" are right out in the throng. Malls are infested with shoppers who appear to be navigating by cellular compass. Groups of diners sit ignoring one another, staring down at their phones as if fumbling with rosaries. Commuters, jaywalkers, even mourners -- everyone in the Philippines seems to be texting over the phone. Most use English, since messages usually can be typed more quickly than in Tagalog.

Related Article Virus Brings Publicity to Computer Subculture in Philippines (May 15, 2000)

Faye Siytangco, a 23-year-old airline sales representative, was not surprised when at the wake for a friend's father she saw people bowing their heads and gazing toward folded hands. But when their hands started beeping and their thumbs began to move, she realized to her astonishment that they were not, in fact, praying.

"People were actually sitting there and texting," Siytangco said. "Filipinos don't see it as rude anymore."

The popularity of the practice puts the Philippines at the forefront of wireless Internet usage, well ahead of much richer countries. Already, people can use their phones to send text messages to computers, and vice versa. Here as elsewhere, the newest mobile phones have access to an abridged World Wide Web. And not far away is new technology that is supposed to make browsing on a hand phone as easy and as fast as it is on a personal computer.

All this gives high-technology executives like Roy Buzon, an American venture capitalist who is investing in local start-ups, confidence that wireless technologies will help the Philippines close the Internet usage gap with the United States and Europe.

Why is the new text message system so popular here? Many say it is the high-technology Filipino equivalent of gesticulating -- body language with an antenna. "Filipinos are very gregarious -- we like to talk a lot," said Rodolfo Salalima, a senior vice president at Globe Telecom, the local cellular operator benefiting most from the trend.

They also love a good bargain. The craze for sending text messages by phone started last year, when Globe introduced prepaid cards that enabled students -- and soldiers -- too poor for a long-term subscription to start using cellular phones, which can be bought cheaply. Since talking on mobile phones costs 8 pesos a minute, about 20 cents, and sending text messages from them was free, people quickly figured out how to express themselves on a phone's alphanumeric keypad.

By the end of the year, Globe was handling 18 million messages a day, roughly 26 per customer, more than all the messages sent in Germany, France, Italy and Britain combined.

	Aaron Favila for The New York Times
	Monica Serrano, a Manila student, had a laugh over a text message she received on her cell phone.

After Globe's network ground to a halt a few times under the load, it instituted a 1 peso-a-message charge to promote "responsible" use of text messaging. That cut the average messages per customer in half, but the number of Globe customers has doubled. Generation Text, as the media dubbed it, was born.

Sending text messages does not require making a call. People merely type in a message and the recipient's phone number, hit the phone's send key and off it goes to the operator's message center, which forwards it to the recipient. Because messages are exchanged over the frequency the network uses to identify phones rather than the frequencies their owners talk on, messages can be sent and received the instant a phone is turned on -- and can even be received when a phone call is in progress.

Sending text messages by phone is an irritating skill to master, largely because 26 letters, plus punctuation, have to be created with only 10 buttons. Typing the letter C, for example, requires pressing the No. 2 button three times; an E is the No. 3 button pressed twice; and so on. After the message is composed, it can be sent immediately to the phone number of the recipient, who can respond immediately by the same process.

People using phones for text messages have developed a shorthand similar to that found in Internet chat rooms. "Where are you?" becomes "WRU." And "See you tonight" becomes "CU 2NYT."

People have different styles of keying in their messages. Some use their index fingers, some one thumb, some both. Two thumbs is the way to go for Rowena Bayangos, who sat outside a cafe recently thumbing in an entire letter to a colleague from a draft she had written out longhand.

"I don't have to go home or to an Internet cafe," she said. "And I'm just spending a couple of pesos."

Then there are the truly sophisticated users, like 19-year-old Tristan Sta. Ines, who sat recently outside a Subway sandwich shop, a Marlboro Light cigarette dangling from his mouth and dark sunglasses on his head, tapping away with one thumb without even looking at his phone. "I got used to it because I always text while I'm driving," he said.

The advantage of sending text messages over talking becomes obvious in a noisy bar or on Manila's noisy streets. But in addition to conveying what cannot easily be heard, sending text messages by phone is providing Filipinos with a way of conveying what isn't easily said in Asia's only predominantly Catholic nation. "You can express yourself more freely," Bola said.

Bola, for example, said he once asked a woman out on a date in a text message over his phone. "I was too shy to call her," he said. There's flirtatious text messaging, text foreplay, text sex and even text pornography. For some young lovers, text messages over the phone are the first time they share those magic words, "i luv u."

Josephine Aguilar, a sociology professor at the University of Santo Tomas, says such behavior is common. "That's our culture," she said. "We call this 'hiya.' It means shy or ashamed."

Text messages over the phone are a high-technology veil, protective yet provocative. The nonconfrontational nature of such messages also makes them a hit in Indonesia, where politeness often calls for ambiguity. The same goes for Japan, where NTT DoCoMo has 7.3 million customers using the Web on cell phones, sending an average of five e-mail messages a day.

Not all the messages Globe's customers send are appreciated. The Philippine Department of Education finally had to ban the use of mobile phones in grade schools to stop kids from cheating: they were sending text answers to one another during exams. Police complain that drivers busy typing in traffic are causing accidents.

Some people busy themselves striking up exchanges with complete strangers by guessing likely Globe subscriber numbers (the first four numbers are all the same). And because pre-paid cards give people a temporary telephone number that is not linked to a name or billing address, they also confer an anonymity that can be abused. People have been known to receive lewd messages and threats by text.

April Fool's Day rained tasteless text jokes. One said the Pope had died, while another said President Joseph Estrada had. A political joke followed combining the two, asking its readers to pray the former was untrue and the latter was.

Protests followed from the Presidential Palace and the church. "Love of neighbor for the love of God is applicable even to texters young and old alike," Archbishop Oscar Cruz wrote to a local newspaper.

The jokes have not stopped, with current events offering new grist. "Muslim guerrillas have kidnapped Estrada," goes one of the latest. "They say that if they don't get a large ransom, they will let him go free."

The guerrillas may not have President Estrada, but they have a direct line to his troops. Many soldiers eager to keep in touch with their families while fighting in the southern island of Mindanao took cell phones with them. To make sure they could get a good signal, some brought two.

With no regulations against carrying the phones into the field, Gen. Rio said, cellular phones made their way to the front and, in the heat of battle, turned up in enemy hands, complete with their memory full of phone numbers.

It wasn't long, the general said, before rebels started lobbing text messages at soldiers. He declined to share any examples, but said they tended to be "childish."

"It's the lighter side of this war," he said. "But who knows, maybe it's better that they fight by texting."