People try to avoid face to face interaction with other people if it involve something unpleasent. It seems easier to say or even do things if the person on the other side of the conversation is faceless. To some extent this is the case with telephones. SMS and instant messaging takes this to the next level. In addition to being faceless the person on the other side of the conversation does not even have a voice. Different aspects and even levels of embodiment encourage different types of social interaction. In the case of SMS and instant messaging, people find it easier to easier to say things that they would otherwise find relatively difficult to do. Enter Triple Talaqs, a topic which has gained some controversy in recent years. In a Triple Talaq a man can divorce his wife by uttering the T word thrice and he is ‘off the hook.’ In some Muslim countries Muslim men have divorced their wives by SMSing or texting their wives the T message three times. This issue came into the mainstream media a few years ago in Malaysia when some Malaysian Muslims divorced their wives using SMS on their cell phones. At that time Azalina Othman of UMNO rightly observed that such actions trivialize divorce. However for many such men unfortunately divorce is a trivial thing. The whole SMS divorce affair even went to the courts in Malaysia but the courts ruled in favor of the legality of the divorce. The controversy has not quite died down in recent years as the courts later on declared that giving such divorces via SMS was an offense if the husbands do not seek permission from the shariah court. These issues would not arise if the such SMS divorces were declared illegal. Given the propensity of some men to use rules for their advantage it would not be far off into the future when some Muslim man would divorce his wife’s character in the Second Life or even in the Sims and demand that it should be taken seriously in the real life. Loti Zadeh observed that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Thus if the laws of the land do not reflect the state of the technology and do not take into account the inclination of some men to abuse rules then SMS would seem like a viable option for pronouncing divorce for those people since they do not have to think about the emotional issues and even forgo the emotional reaction of their wives.
Filed under: Internet Technologies, Uncategorized
