Recent events show a serious side to new communication technologies

You can send a text message to cast your vote for an American Idol. You can send one to get registration forms to vote for president. Many teens and young adults "text" as a way to flirt or chat through a boring lecture.

But there's another side to the ubiquitous technology.

A 14-year-old South Carolina girl used a text message to rescue herself from an earthen dungeon.

And a 16-year-old used the cell phone she'd recently received as a birthday present to send a parting message to her family before a gunman in her Colorado school fatally shot her. "i love u guys," Emily Keyes wrote.

Instant messages, another fingertip medium, help countless parents keep in touch with their kids when they're away. But a disgraced former lawmaker used IMs to flirt with underage congressional pages.

Every day, millions of short messages fly through the ether cell-to-cell or between computers and cell phones. We use them to do our banking, to enter sweepstakes, answer polls, donate to charity. And as recent events have shown us, they can save lives — or do harm.

"To virtually every technology there's a good side and a bad side. And in a really short time span here, we've seen the good side and the bad side of text messaging," says Steven Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and author of the book "Cybersociety."

'Texting' popularity soaring

Americans sent nearly 65 billion SMS messages — 160-character "short message service" notes transmitted across mobile phone networks — in the first six months of 2006, nearly double the number sent during the same period last year, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, voice of the industry.

The first text message was sent Dec. 3, 1992, when British engineer Neil Papworth sent an early "MERRY CHRISTMAS" from his computer to a colleague's mobile phone. It wasn't Samuel Morse's telegraphed "What hath God wrought?" or even Alexander Graham Bell's sublimely mundane telephone request, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you." But Papworth's concise, two-word greeting was the harbinger of a communications revolution that has encircled the globe.