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> One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in having asynchronous communication
by cgriswald 4y ago
> One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in having asynchronous communications. If I absolutely need an immediate answer from someone or a realtime 1:1 conversation on something urgent I'll call them on the phone instead.
This is lost on, as far as I can tell, at least 50% of the people I regularly text, despite me explicitly pointing this out to them.
In the years before email and texting and even ubiquitous answering machines, when phone calls were all you had, there were people who could not let the phone ring without picking it up. I see people respond this way to text messages now. They not only have to pick up the phone to read the message immediately, but they have to engage with the conversation immediately as well. (And not just for work messages.)
I don't know how people live that way...
- walrus01 4y ago> I don't know how people live that way... Based on what I've observed, in a state of constant low level anxiety interconnected with certain weird societal expectations of activity/behavior on popular social media (facebook/instagram/twitter/snapchat/tiktok/etc)
- alar44 4y agoI just do it so I don't forget. If I don't respond within 5 minutes, it's going to get lost. I'm the same with email, I respond as quickly as possible so it's done and the ball is passed on to the next person.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoThat's how I am. I don't like responding ASAP, but the alternative is no response at all (or suddenly responding six months later).
- tlavoie 4y agoBetter yet, for some people, the expectation of this mostly-async communication is that you will respond as quickly as they type. My adult son deals with anxiety, and when he's stressed, I'll get multiple texts in a row. If I'm not responding for some reason, one of them will be "???" as in, "hello, are you going to respond?" A bit of temperature-lowering, sanity enhancement, comes from using the auto-set sleep/focus settings in iMessage, and training him to understand that random texts in the middle of the night can, and will wait until we're awake enough to look. If it's really that critical, a phone call can still work.
- cgriswald 4y agoIndeed, I should have mentioned that as well. Nearly all of the people who compulsively[0] respond ASAP have an expectation that their recipients will do so as well. Sometimes they have an anxiety response, like apparently your son, sometimes they have an anger response, or a hurt response… it's like "expectation is the root of suffering" in action. [0] - As opposed to people who do so for other reasons, like others in these threads have mentioned doing.
- tlavoie 4y agoRegarding anxiety vs anger vs hurt response, why pick just one? Indeed, our son's expectations are sometimes pretty unidirectional. (Mental health stuff, depends how he's doing at the time.) With some effort though, this gradual training of expectations seems to help. Similarly perhaps, I came across a suggestion recently for scheduling email as a matter of course. I tend to respond immediately (if not too intrusive), or make a note to come back to something I mean to respond to, but this idea was that perhaps some time lag as a regular thing makes sense. If I recall correctly, the recipient is not only fine with the delay, but actually considers your response as more worthwhile, because you likely put some time into it. Perception vs reality? If perception is what matters more, that might be a reasonable approach.