Use of SMS in Office Environments

Investigations of Short Messaging System (SMS) or texting have been directed at private use and mostly the adolescent population. The present paper investigates SMS in a representative sample of office environments in a Scandinavian town. The results indicate that SMS messaging is not integrated into office work, that the messages are highly informal, mostly from the private sphere and from persons well known to the receiver. Different explanations of the infrequent use of SMS in the workplace, e.g. cost sharing between employer and employee, are proposed. One explanation ties the difference in popularity in the private and business spheres to technical aspects of the system and its user interface. This explanation is based upon the Gricean concept of conversational implicature and Clark’s concept of common ground and is elaborated at length. This explanation suggests that SMS is an inherently informal communication system, ill suited to the business domain.