Daily Dose of English 8
Text Messages
Daily Dose of English 8
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about text messages, texting, SMS messages, or just messages. Messages or text messages are something that I think pretty much everybody nowadays uses every single day. They've become an integral part of our life. It's how we communicate with people from ... Anyone from our most loved individuals, family members, all the way to our friends or people that we don't even like. Very frequently, you have to text people that you don't know or you don't really care about. It's also how you can communicate with businesses or companies or even the Uber driver who's trying to pick you up that can't find the street that you're on. There's so many different ways that we use text messages nowadays, and it's just become a thing that is everywhere in our life. There's even a ton of different ways to send them. We generally use the word text or message to be a generic term, but it can actually refer to actual text messages that go on ... Actually, I don't really know how they work. Actual text messages, WhatsApp messages, Telegram, Signal, Discord, whatever there is, we often just call them messages or texts if you're being a little more casual. It's pretty common in the US to say, send me a text. Like I said, everybody uses text messages. They're so, so common. Not everywhere is still ... Not all parts of the world are totally covered with cell service or internet, and so there's definitely huge portions of people that don't send text messages, but I know that they're also pretty common and popular in some parts of the world where the internet is worse and SMS is actually still functional. There's tons of different ways that people use text messages from checking their bank balance to checking any messages they have to ... It's two-factor authentication is a really common thing that texts are still used for. Absolutely everything. I primarily nowadays use WhatsApp for messaging, but that's actually not the most common thing in the US. Where I'm from, really the most of the US, the default message app is way more used than WhatsApp. A lot of people, especially if they're older than, say, 30, probably don't ever use WhatsApp unless they have foreign friends specifically that are like, use the WhatsApp. That's all I use, but it doesn't really come pre-installed. It's not really a used thing. The default messages app, which ends up often being iMessage because most of the US uses iPhones, it's some crazy market share, like 70% or something like that, I don't know off the top of my head, but it's really, really common for people to have iPhones and only use iMessage to communicate. I know that my grandma struggles to send me a text on anything that's not iMessage. It's kind of funny to get a random iMessage from her, and it's the only message I have among a sea of SMSs from, like I said, tooth factor authentication, or we'll send you your verification code via text, or whatever it might be. But I've got a bunch of those, because that's way more common for me, and then I'll have just one message from my grandma every so often there. Nowadays, I might not even see those messages. I'm just so used to using WhatsApp. I've gotten the rest of my family to use it, and it has just become the thing that I use to message. But there's also a lot of other ways, like I said, some countries even prefer to use different messaging systems. I know that WeChat is the popular option, or I guess it's the only real option in China. There's some places that use Line a lot. I'm sure there's a ton more options that I've never even heard of, that certain countries just all use. But it's a really interesting field, I guess I could say, or it's an interesting problem to solve, because the actual problem that people are trying to solve, like us as individuals, is to be able to send messages to people. That's it. I want to be able to send images, text, and audio to my friends, or my family, or whoever. And that's the entire problem to be solved. It's a relatively simple problem in terms of things to solve with a product. Products can get very complicated depending on what they're trying to solve. If you sell a product that helps dog owners to clean the hair off of the carpet, that's a product that's pretty specific. Not everybody has a carpet, not everybody has a dog, not everybody cares, and so you have to make a very specific product and that sort of thing. But with messaging, pretty much everybody wants the same thing, really. Fast, quick, secure messaging for those things. Despite that, there's still tons of huge companies that have, or huge platforms, they're not necessarily always companies, but they usually are, that have millions of users communicating on their platform. And something that I think is interesting is that as a platform gets bigger, it also gets more useful. People don't really want to switch off of WhatsApp because all of their friends use WhatsApp, everybody they know uses WhatsApp, and so switching off of it would make their experience worse. And so it's inherently sticky. People don't want to leave a platform that they're already on. And it can be annoying. I know when I switched to primarily using WhatsApp, it took me a little while to get used to it and to get people on there with me. But now it's become my normal, my default, the thing that I use every single day. But there's also lots of other kinds of messaging systems that I use. For example, something like HelloTalk, which I use to communicate with native speakers of Czech, which is the language I'm learning, but there's native speakers from everywhere on there. And that has a messaging system. Sure, they're not text messages, technically, but they are messages, I think they're called internet messages, IMs, in the actual correct term for them. But I use that fairly often to communicate with Czech speakers. It's got a few extra features that are useful for language learners. I don't use it all the time, I don't love it, but it is there. And the one that I use probably the second most often after WhatsApp, potentially even more often, is Discord. Because Discord allows me to communicate with lots of people at once and with communities of people that I might not necessarily know in person. Plus, Discord is the messaging system that we use for my work. And so I'm on there six hours a day or something like that, just to communicate with the other work people. Probably not that often, but it's open a lot of the time on my computer. And that's also how I communicate with coworkers and that sort of thing. And so there's a lot of different options, and it's very likely that you use many different messaging systems as well. Because that's just the world we live in. And I find it interesting as well switching over to a different platform or just trying to switch phones, right? Is it difficult to switch because you're going to lose all of your chats or all of your history? Are you the sort of person that cares about that, that you'd like to have the history that you can go back and look at? I know just today I went back to a conversation I had with a friend because I remember sending her something like two years ago, and I wanted to see if I could find that thing. I didn't actually manage to find it. I gave up. But I've done that before. I found past conversations. I found past photos or files or just funny anecdotes, funny stories that I might have told or they might have told me. And so using those old conversations like that can actually be a really nice thing. It's not necessarily just to go look and see, did they do what I said or did they lie to me or whatever? Because that's, I mean, that does happen, right? You're going to check if you said the right thing to somebody. But that's all, as you might say, water under the bridge, things that have gone past already. They're things that happened in the past, right, so the water went under the bridge. But it can be useful, right, if you want to go back and check things. But I think right now my favorite text thread, which you might, another term you might hear, is usually a thread has multiple people in it, and it's about one specific topic. But I've been sharing with my family, we've been sharing our daily scores for a game, Time Guesser, which shows you a picture from some point in history, and you have to guess where it is and when it was. And so it's a really fun game. We've been sharing our scores every day for a couple of weeks now, and we all really enjoy the game and learning things about it. But yeah, that is my episode here on text messages, or rather more messages is what I ended up talking about, all different kinds of messages. But I hope that you learned a little something, maybe a word or two, and that you had a good time listening to me talk today. But that is everything that I have. I appreciate you being here, and I'll see you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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