Yet more interesting stuff from this week’s Economist (Economist.com | European telecoms). It seems …

One of the fastest-growing uses of text messaging, moreover, is interacting with television. Gartner’s figures show that 20% of teenagers in France, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have sent messages in response to TV shows.

I hate “reality television” shows, such as the Big Brother series, which have been the prime source of this interactive television trend. I have yet to see or hear any participant or fan with anything significant to say on any of these programmes. As far as I’m concerned the primary benefit of getting them all to communicate by text message is that each one is limited to only 164 characters. You can’t have too many run-on sentences with that reality!