Peter Sinclair: Underwriting the teenage thumb

In the insurance biz, every new set of initials can present a fresh hazard.

The industry faces its latest snag in the unlikeliest digit of all - the teenage thumb.

The SMS (short message service) craze, which is gathering momentum in much of the Western world, is already affecting premiums in Japan and Finland, both countries where the teen and pre-teen set have learned to touch-type with their thumbs.

A whole new syndrome requires underwriting. TMI - or text message injury - is a variety of painful inflammation being experienced by kids as they tap out torrents of text on their mobiles, heedless of the fact that they will probably feel like suing someone 10 years from now.

The hundreds of tiny repetitive movements on a cellphone's cramped keyboard are not sufficiently vigorous to encourage circulation of the blood, which means the fingers are being forced to operate like an engine without oil, reports Wired magazine.

The US Government is unconcerned at this stage - SMS has yet to sweep a nation where kids own more computers than cellphones - but the British RSI (repetitive strain injury) Association has already expressed concern.

I mean, when even poets reach for the phone rather than the quill, you've got a potential problem.

SMS poetry, an art-form not unlike the Japanese haiku in its haunting brevity, is a uniquely British craze now being encouraged even by pillars of the literary establishment such as the Guardian newspaper as the Muses brush up their typing skills and move online.

The paper's competition last month attracted more than 7500 short works composed on cellphones all over the world as a new literary genre was born.

"A text-message poem has to find one truthful moment and describe it," says Andrew Wilson, a published SMS poet who offered entrants a few tips on capturing that luminous detail the Muses prize so highly within the bounds of the compression (160 characters) demanded by a mobile's minuscule screen.

Julia Bird's winning poem - chosen by the entrants - received £1000 ($3460). This, perhaps, is the language of a generation more comfortable texting than talking:

14:/ a txt mesg pom./ his is r bunsn brnr bl%,/ his hair like fe filings / W/ac/dc going thru./ I sit by him in kemistry,/ it splits my @oms / wen he pi2078s @ me.

Translation: 14: / a text message poem / his eyes are Bunsen burner blue, / his hair like iron filings / with ac/dc going through, / I sit by him in chemistry, / it splits my atoms / when he smiles at me.

That distant revving sound, incidentally, is Byron, Keats and Shelley in their graves ...

BOOKMARKS


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Advisory: science or sci-fi?

* petersinclair@email.com

RSI risk

SMS poetry

Guardian

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

Dell

Mobinet mobile users survey

eMarketer

Athena

Gekkomat