The Horror Continues to Continue...
Jump forward weeks later and my sister repeatedly attempted to send me picture mail. After waiting several minutes I responded to her blank message with a frowny face:( to emphasize my frustration and sadness. According to Martin Solomon "Punctuation marks have tonal value just as letter forms do; they also have mass and energy" (2). My frowny faced emoticon was full of negative energy and I believe my sister sensed this because she finally sent me a text which read: I GIVE UP! (Her punctuation also communicated some frustration and negativity) I kept telling her to resend it before I finally took out my battery and put it back in (something that usually seems to work for both my cell phone and my laptop). When my phone came back to life I realized that my picture mail had been out of service for quite some time. I was receiving pictures friends had sent weeks before and to my complete and utter horror there (in full frontal nudity) were more pictures from popular guy.
Suddenly it all made sense. I had been wondering what made him think I would ever send him naked pictures of myself and here was the reason right in front of me. He had been sending me completely nude snapshots of himself and his man parts the entire time we had been communicating with one another. "Pyschological studies have confirmed the common assumption that, in general terms, images tend to elicit more emotional responses while print messages tend to elicit more analytic responses"(Hill 4). Had the annoyance been a simple description of his private area instead of an actual image my response might not have been as emotional.My eyes felt violated and my hope for a relationship with a normal person was more than a little shattered. All at once I had realized the downfall of cellular phone technology: the unwanted picture mail!