The same weekend I began reading Julie Beck’s article “How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails,” I found myself guilty of being the said ignorer.
A friend had texted me earlier that day, asking if I wanted to meet her in Downtown L.A. with her and her boyfriend. I love this friend, but abhor mid-Sunday Los Angeles traffic. I also knew I had a big day ahead the following Monday and don’t like to be out late on “school nights.” But I didn’t have the heart to say “No thanks, maybe next time?” right off the bat. So I let the message sit as I went about my day, finally responding to it three days later. Considering that for most of us, our smartphones are chained to us wherever we go, it’s likely that it doesn’t take a long time for our friends to see the messages we send them -- even though they might respond hours or even days later. To be honest, I enjoy the freedom texting gives me to delay my responses. It’s the reason why I’ve disabled the read receipts on my phone. “The defining feature of conversation is the expectation of a response,” Beck writes in The Atlantic. But while text communication is meant to “mimic” the ebbs and flows of face-to-face conversations, it’s ironic that the instantaneous nature of texting has given us a way to slow our responses to messages. In turn, we pay for the convenience of a supposedly speedy communication method with anxiety and the overanalyzing of the texts we do receive. At the same time, the convenience of text communication leaves much to be wanted. For example, I cannot gauge the full meaning of a text message without being able to interpret my friend’s body language and voice fluctuation. Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguist, iterates that the “metamessages” that come with texts can make the messages even more confusing to read: “...because the technologies, and the conventions for using them, are so new and are changing so fast, even close friends and relatives have differing ideas about how they should be used. And because metamessages are implied rather than stated, they can be misinterpreted or missed entirely.” In dating, the “three days rule” is a concept popularized by movies and television shows. The idea is that the pursuer (a man, usually) should wait three days -- supposedly the appropriate waiting period -- before texting the person of his desire. Texting any sooner than that might make him look eager or worse, desperate. Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at MIT, expands on this idea, saying that “taking a long time to write back is a way of establishing dominance in a relationship, by making yourself look simply too busy and important to reply.” Aside from the fact that I believe that there shouldn’t be a “dominant” partner in a relationship, I find this mentality problematic. While dating, I never once thought to myself, “Gee, I’m really attracted to this person. He’s so funny and I just love the way he takes forever to respond.” In fact, what drew me to my boyfriend now is that he never had an air of “I’m too busy to be bothered.” Beck states that despite all the anxieties that come with text messaging, texting is still the preferred method of communication for Americans under the age of 50. But texting is a double-edged sword; it provides all the conveniences of a mini-computer and Rolodex but obligates the smartphone owner to be constantly chained, or rather connected, to their network. We’re often so connected, even to the point that we lose sleep, writes Eric Andrew-Gee in his article for The Globe and Mail, “Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?” Andrew-Gee writes, “Smartphone use takes about the same cognitive toll as losing a full night’s sleep. In other words, they are making us worse at being alone and worse at being together.” What’s even more frightening is that Americans reportedly spend three to five hours each day looking at their smartphones. Assuming that this doesn’t include using social media for work (I’m a content creator for social media), it was saddening to read Andrew-Gee’s prediction that most of us will spend the equivalent of seven years on our phones. In summary, it’s more than odd that as much as we desire the instantaneous -- whether it’s news articles, status updates, Instagram/Snapchat stories, or text messages -- we also want to slow the pace of how and when we reply. Although it would seem that something as simple as responding to a text takes no time at all, it’s actually an added source of stress for smartphone users. In an effort to stay connected with our established friend groups, we run the risk of feeling technologically burned out.
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