A World Wide Web of Disconnection
Of the Information Age’s many gifts to humanity, very few would argue that communication is one of those that have had the biggest impact on daily living. For most of human history, the speed of communication was limited by the speed of the various modes of transport. Most letters were delivered by riders on horses or pigeons and no communication could go faster than that. This lag acted as the final barrier, the thing that stood between the scattered tribes of humanity all around the world and true homogeneity and connection. Or so many people thought.
We can find objections to this line of reasoning dating back centuries. The transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Henry David Thoreau pointed out that it appeared that people were much in a haste to quicken communication for no real reason, quipping that “it could be that Maine and Texas have nothing of note to talk about”, in response to the construction of a telegraphic connection between the two states. His reservations were just as valid then as they are now and they raise real questions about what truly constitutes an ‘improvement’ when we speak of communication. Is speed the only metric by which we can judge communication? To that, he said, “the man whose horse trots a mile a minute does not carry the most important message”. It’s a foreign metaphor to us, the idea of the man and horse that carries the message, yet we embraced with little consideration technologies that promised to help us communicate faster i.e. faster horses. Was this an improvement that came truly free of charge? One has to wonder.
It’s not at all difficult to see why people were very quick to embrace the new communication technologies when they arrived. All it takes is a short trip back to the 80s for us to find ourselves in an age where international or transcontinental communication was out of the reach of most ordinary folk. Back then, international calls cost an arm and a leg, had poor sound quality, and had to be routed by an operator. Sending letters was cheaper but also slow and, in many places, too unreliable to be counted on. It’s no wonder the dawn of email, SMS, and, subsequently, instant messaging were seen as miraculous. It seemed as if the final barrier had come down.
A simple comparison between snail-mail and instant messaging today shows us that the differences go beyond just speed. Yes, letters were slow, and waiting was inevitable (they still are in many places), but this meant that we had to learn patience. There was no way around that. The other key difference was that we never truly knew if the other person had received the letter until we got a response. The dawn of the internet brought to the masses something that had been, until then, foreign to us — instantaneous communication. Email arrived, but it was still much closer to snail-mail than what we have today because it maintained the veil of ignorance between sender and recipient. The sender still had no way of knowing if their message had been received or read. Since one always had to find an internet-enabled computer to reply to their emails, responses to emails were hardly ever instantaneous. In reality, email was instantaneous only theoretically, but rarely in practice until mobile devices with internet connections popped up on the scene.
The first text message was sent in 1992 and its arrival broke down these barriers that had, until then, restricted communication. They did not need an internet connection and were almost always delivered unless the recipient’s phone was powered off. Some service providers even provided a delivery report facility. This was revolutionary in itself, but the effects went far beyond just communication. When everything is faster, be it communication or transportation, the implication is that we must hurry. Modern life is so fast-paced because our technologies are chasing speed, giving the impression that everything has to be faster and everything we do must be quicker. As for communication, the norms were morphing, too. When you send a message and don’t receive a response even when you know it has been delivered, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why the other person has not replied. But, even then, there was still room to imagine that maybe the other person had just not checked their phone yet. The barriers were still standing, but they were about to come crashing down.
The humble IM, as it was affectionately referred to in the 90s, brought with it several revolutionary features whose impact was felt beyond the communication landscape. One of them, as the name suggests, was that it was (and still is) instantaneous. Another was that the sender could see not only that the message had been delivered, but also that the recipient was online and that they had read the message. One would not be blamed for imagining that this would bring people so much closer to each other. This, however, presented new problems. Without dwelling much on the details of each unique scenario, most people would feel snubbed if they sent a message and saw that the recipient had seen it, read it, and was online but had simply chosen not to reply. This was a new feeling that we had to deal with. We had spent our whole history lamenting our inability to communicate faster, and now that we could, we had to deal with people not wanting to do so or choosing to speak to other people instead of us.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine that most, if not all people want to feel valued, loved, and wanted. We feel discomfort from isolation and loneliness, and when the people that we want to talk to have the ability to do so and choose not to, no amount of rationalization can lessen that pain. We are endowed with this unique ability — our theory of mind (ToM) — which helps us to attribute mental states such as intentions, desires, and emotions to those around us. It helps us with social interaction, but in other cases, it can be a burden. Sometimes our overactive ‘ToM’ leads us to conclude that we’ve not received a response because we said something stupid or because the other person does not want to talk to us. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it reflects certain attitudes and expectations that we have come to have in regards to communication. Is it possible that this newfound ability to delay or forego responding to messages even when the other person knows that we have read them has given timely responses some kind of cultural significance? That has become a metric by which we compare our relationships — we imagine that those people whom we text more often or who are quick to respond value us more than those who do not.
This is a phenomenon that I think is best illustrated by the cultural significance of WhatsApp’s blue ticks. There’s nothing wrong with being blue-ticked in any objective sense, yet it does hold some symbolic meaning. Most people don’t like to be blue-ticked and even avoid blue-ticking other people, too. It’s inevitable whenever two people communicate that one of them will have the last word, yet you find that, nowadays, we sometimes don’t even open messages because doing so gives us the nagging feeling that we have to respond. Our responses are rushed and lifeless, and sometimes we don’t even respond if a long message is required because anything that is not quick and efficient has no place in today’s world. Fast-paced modern society has given slow and steady negative connotations and this can be seen in almost every aspect of our lives.
The pursuit of speed has become the dominant dogma in our society today. Those at the frontiers of technological advancement entice us with the notion that we have to be able to do everything faster, to be more productive, and to finish more things. Internet-connected phones and instant messaging brought new (and maybe dangerous) ideas into our communication zeitgeist: there’s no reason to reply to a message late. We imagine that someone should be able to pick up their phone and type a quick reply. And, why not? From pop-up notifications to floating chat bubbles, typing a quick reply is pretty much effortless. Yet, there’s more we stand to lose than the few seconds that it takes to type a quick reply. Even a tiny task like that could have a greater effect on our brains. Our attention spans have been shortened by technologies that are designed for interruption and disruption. Could you actually finish a task if, every couple of minutes, you had to stop, pick up your phone, and reply to every message that you receive?
The shortening of our attention spans is, ultimately, beneficial to the companies that seek to prey on our fear of missing out to keep us hooked on their technologies. With so much more competition for attention, companies have had to come up with more innovative ways to grab ours. The humble notification has undergone a radical metamorphosis, turning every new message or incoming call into an assault on the senses. Phone makers have played their part, too, in this game with phones coming out today that have curved screens or screens on their backs so that even placing your phone face down and on silent won’t spare you from that twinkle that seeks to grab your attention. It is because of this that we know that to not respond to a text message is often an active choice because our technologies have made it all but impossible to miss one. Our phones ring and vibrate and the screen lights up along with an LED notification light as if to say “Hey! You can’t miss this! This is important,”, yet more often than not, it isn’t. It is in this way that this illusion of urgency is created, one that implants the idea in our heads that every beep and buzz demands our attention. As Nietzsche said in The Gay Science, “one lives as if one always ‘might miss out on something’”. And, despite this warning being close to a century and a half old, his other writings show that he was aware that his message would only increase in relevance with time.
The result of this is that many of us now live in a constant tug of war of, at least subconsciously, recognizing how unreasonable it is to expect that every text message should get an immediate response, but also feeling like everyone expects us to do just that. This has created what I call the ‘GB WhatsApp effect’. Modified versions of instant messengers have become commonplace on the internet, offering additional features that complement those native to the original apps. One of these features, as seen on modified versions of WhatsApp, is the ability to set a static ‘last seen’ time. Of course, the developers of WhatsApp already caved to users’ demands by enabling the ability to deactivate read receipts or hide one’s last seen, but even that is no match for the static last seen. I spoke in length in Image Culture about the deceptive nature of cyberspace and how it is breaking down our ability to trust the things we see online. How can we trust each other when there’s always the possibility that we are being deceived? When one’s last seen can be faked and read receipts can be deactivated, late replies start to look pretty suspicious, even when the other person’s last seen tells us that they are not available. Yet, we should be asking ourselves why exactly we feel the need to use such deceptive methods when we can’t immediately respond to a message. Are we obliged to reply to every text message when we are online? When we hide our availability information, are we doing it to free ourselves from the pressure to respond, or do we think we are doing it for other people so that they do not feel ignored when we cannot respond?
The inability to trust each other or any part of the world around us may be one reason for the feelings of alienation and disconnection that most people feel today. This feeling of being ‘alone in a crowd’, as it has been called, reveals itself in the rising popularity of music and movie characters that express similar sentiments. Many studies have also been carried out in the last two decades that have revealed a counterintuitive increase of feelings of loneliness, alienation, and anxiety in members of a generation that is more connected than any other in the history of mankind. Why would that be the case? We can talk to whomever we want, whenever we want, for however long we want, and, I think, we have more than enough platforms to keep us constantly appraised on what the people in our lives (and strangers, too) are getting up to. Yet, it seems, even with all this freedom in our hands, we still find our thirst for connection unsatisfied. Maybe that’s because there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we have ‘improved’ upon our existing methods of communication. There’s so much falsity and deception that everything just seems so fake and unreliable. We never know if our friends are busy, ignoring us, or replying late to look busy, whether they are offline or their last seen has been hidden, and every message we send is accompanied by the fear of being blue-ticked.
“I always hear people complain about the place that they live,
That all the people here are fake and they got nothin’ to give”Drake, Emotionless
All of this is to say that the arrival of the instant messenger did not just mean faster communication. It was accompanied by new norms and expectations in how we interact with the people around us. When most messages can be sent and received in the blink of an eye, are we obliged to always respond immediately? Is it bad to choose not to do so? How long is it acceptable to delay a response before it is considered to be too late? If we choose not to respond immediately, are elementary methods of deception such as the static last seen or hidden read receipts necessary to mask the fact that we can’t/would prefer not to talk at that time? These are not unreasonable questions; this is where we must start if we are to stop the rot that’s eating away at our inability to connect and communicate.
Of course, there will be those that will point to the many advantages of instant messaging and other forms of instantaneous communication. Having lived through the COVID pandemic, I shudder to imagine how the situation would have played out if we had no methods of communication for countries to be alerted of the spread of the disease, or how people would have survived through lockdowns without the ability to keep in touch with their friends and families. Beyond that, there’s a comfort that comes with being able to know whether or not one’s message has been received, but the flip side of that coin is the dizziness of trying to figure out why we have not received a response. These tools can change our lives for the better, but they can be equally destructive. This is because they are not, as most people would have you believe, innocent tools whose effect is governed only by the user. These tools amplify who we are.
It is not uncommon to hear people talking about the vast ‘improvements’ that we have made in the field of communication, yet we may not be looking at the whole picture by judging them based on a few, handpicked metrics. Yes, we can now communicate faster, but are all our needs being met by these new technologies? Are our expectations of what they should do for us reasonable? It’s not enough to simply say ‘we can communicate instantly so we must’. It’s likewise not enough to just say “you read my message and didn’t reply so I won’t text you again until you text me”. Nothing stands in the way of us connecting more than our pride, and we have built tools that put us at the mercy of that pride.
We have come a long way from tying messages to pigeons or putting them in bottles. We need to recognize that it’s not just our technology that changes; we have to change with it. Marshall McLuhan put it best, describing technology as ‘the extension of man’. We are a new, bionic race bound to these new extensions of our communicative capacities. They are not objectively better, just different. Where we could speak to a small group of people around a fire, we can now reach potentially millions with a tweet. Where we could speak face-to-face and read the expressions on people’s faces, we now have to read between the lines of a 3-word text message. This new status quo demands that we change, and this can only be done by tying ourselves to openness and re-establishing norms and expectations of communication. A measure of nuance will be required as we learn to navigate these new waters, and that will require patience, compassion, and understanding. We are taking our first baby steps faced with an ocean of possibility, but if we don’t recognize that we are learning to walk all over again, we will stumble and fall with no one there to pick us up.
