I suspect that my friends think that I lie to them about being unreachable as an excuse to simply ignore them. In the modern world there are only a small handful situations in which a person genuinely can’t be expected to be connected and accessible.
Hospitals, which used to be a communications dead zone on account of no cell-phone policies, have largely been assimilated into the civilized world with the introduction of guest WiFi networks. Airplanes are going the same way, although as of yet WiFi is still a paid commodity, and in that is sufficiently expensive as to make it still a reasonable excuse.
International travel used to be a good excuse, but nowadays even countries that don’t offer affordable and consistent cellular data have WiFi hotspots at cafes and hotels. The only travel destinations that are real getaways in this sense- that allow you to get away from the modern life by disconnecting you from the outside world -are developing countries without infrastructure, and the high seas. This is the best and worst part of cruise ships, which charge truly extortionate rates for slow, limited internet access.
The best bet for those who truly don’t want to be reached is still probably the unspoilt wilderness. Any sufficiently rural area will have poor cell reception, but areas which are undeveloped now are still vulnerable to future development. After all, much of the rural farming areas of the Midwest are flat and open. It only takes one cell tower to get decent, if not necessarily fast, service over most of the area.
Contrast this to the geography of the Appalachian or Rocky Mountains, which block even nearby towers from reaching too far, and in many cases are protected by regulations. Better yet, the geography of Alaska combines several of these approaches, being sufficiently distant from the American heartland that many phone companies consider it foreign territory, as well as being physically huge, challenging to develop, and covered in mountains and fjords that block signals.
I enjoy cruises, and my grandparents enjoy inviting us youngsters up into the mountains of the northeast, and so I spend what is probably for someone of my generation, a disproportionate amount of time disconnected from digital life. For most of my life, this was an annoyance, but not a problem, mostly because my parents handled anything important enough to have serious consequences, but partially because, if not before social media, then at least before smartphones, being unreachable was a perfectly acceptable and even expected response to attempts at contact.
Much as I still loath the idea of a phone call, and will in all cases prefer to text someone, the phone call, even unanswered, did provide a level of closure that an unanswered text message simply doesn’t. Even if you got the answering machine, it was clear that you had done your part, and you could rest easy knowing that they would call you back at their leisure; or if it was urgent, you kept calling until you got them, or it became apparent that they were truly unreachable. There was no ambiguity whether you had talked to them or not; whether your message had really reached them and they were acting on it, or you had only spoken to a machine.
Okay, sure, there was some ambiguity. Humans have a way of creating ambiguity and drama through whatever form we use. But these were edge cases, rather than seemingly being a design feature of text messages. But I think this paradigm shift is more than just the technology. Even among asynchronous means, we have seen a shift in expectations.
Take the humble letter, the format that we analogize our modern instant messages (and more directly, e-mail) to most frequently and easily. Back in the day when writing letters was a default means of communication, writing a letter was an action undertaken on the part of the sender, and a thing that happened to the receiver. Responding to a letter by mail was polite where appropriate, but not compulsory. This much he format shares with our modern messages.
But unlike our modern systems, with a letter it was understood that when it arrived, it would be received, opened, read, and replied to all in due course, in the fullness of time, when it was practical for the recipient, and not a moment sooner. To expect a recipient to find a letter, tear it open then and there, and drop everything to write out a full reply at that moment, before rushing it off to the post office was outright silly. If a recipient had company, it would be likely that they would not even open the letter until after their business was concluded, unlike today, where text messages are read and replied to even in the middle of conversation.
Furthermore, it was accepted that a reply, even to a letter of some priority, might take some several days to compose, redraft, and send, and it was considered normal to wait until one had a moment to sit down and write out a proper letter, for which one was always sure to have something meaningful to say. Part of this is an artifact of classic retrospect, thinking that in the olden day’s people knew the art of conversation better, and much of it that isn’t is a consequence of economics. Letters cost postage, while today text messaging is often included in phone plans, and in any case social media offers suitable replacements for free.
Except that, for a while at least, the convention held in online spaces too. Back in the early days of email, back when it was E-mail (note the capitalization and hyphenation), and considered a digital facsimile of postage rather than a slightly more formal text message, the accepted convention was that you would sit down to your email, read it thoroughly, and compose your response carefully and in due course, just as you would on hard copy stationary. Indeed, our online etiquette classes*, we were told as much. Our instructors made clear that it was better to take time in responding to queries with a proper reply than get back with a mere one or two sentences.
*Yes, my primary school had online etiquette classes, officially described as “nettiquete courses”, but no one used that term except ironically. The courses were instituted after a scandal in parliament, first about students’ education being outmoded in the 21st century, and second about innocent children being unprepared for the dangers of the web, where, as we all know, ruffians and thugs lurk behind every URL. The curriculum was outdated the moment it was made, and it was discontinued only a few years after we finished the program, but aside from that, and a level of internet paranoia that made Club Penguin look lassaiz faire, it was helpful and accurately described how things worked.
In retrospect, I think this training helps explain a lot of the anxieties I face with modern social media, and the troubles I have with text messages and email. I am acclaimed by others as an excellent writer and speaker, but brevity is not my strong suit. I can cut a swathe through paragraphs and pages, but I stumble over sentences. When I sit down to write an email, and I do, without fail, actually sit down to do so, I approach the matter with as much gravity as though I were writing with quill and parchment, with all the careful and time-consuming redrafting, and categorical verbosity that the format entails.
But email and especially text messages are not the modern reincarnation of the bygone letter, nor even the postcard, with it’s shorter format and reduced formality. Aside from a short length that is matched in history perhaps only by the telegram, the modern text message has nearly totally forgone not only the trappings of all previous formats, but indeed, has seemed to forgo the trappings of form altogether.
Text messages have seemed to become accepted not as a form of communication so much as an avenue of ordinary conversation. Except this is a modern romanticization of text messages. Because while text messages might well be the closest textual approximation of a face to face conversation that doesn’t involve people actually speaking simultaneously, it is still not a synchronous conversation.
More importantly than the associated pleasantries of the genre, text messages work on an entirely different timescale than letters. Where once, with a letter, it might be entirely reasonable for a reply to take a fortnight, nowadays a delay in responding to a text message between friends beyond a single day is a cause for concern and anxiety.
And if it were really a conversation, if two people were conversing in person, or even over the phone, and one person without apparent reason failed to respond to the other’s prompts for a prolonged period, this would indeed be cause for alarm. But even ignoring the obvious worry that I would feel if my friend walking alongside me in the street suddenly stopped answering me, in an ordinary conversation, the tempo is an important, if underrated, form of communication.
To take an extreme example, suppose one person asks another to marry them. What does it say if the other person pauses? If they wait before answering? How is the first person supposed to feel, as opposed to an immediate and enthusiastic response? We play this game all the time in spoken conversation, drawing out words or spacing out sentences, punctuating paragraphs to illustrate our point in ways that are not easily translated to text, at least, not without the advantage of being able to space out one’s entire narrative in a longform monologue.
We treat text messages less like correspondence, and more like conversation, but have failed to account for the effects of asyncronicity on tempo. It is too easy to infer something that was not meant by gaps in messages; to interpret a failure to respond as a deliberate act, to mistake slow typing for an intentional dramatic pause, and so forth.
I am in the woods this week, which means I am effectively cut off from communication with the outside world. For older forms of communication, this is not very concerning. My mail will still be there when I return, and any calls to the home phone will be logged and recorded to be returned at my leisure. Those who sent letters, or reached an answering machine know, or else can guess, that I am away from home, and can rest easy knowing that their missives will be visible when I return.
My text messages and email inbox, on the other hand, concern me, because of the very real possibility that someone will contact me thinking I am reading messages immediately, since my habit of keeping my phone within arm’s reach at all times is well known, and interpreting my failure to respond as a deliberate snub, when in reality I am out of cell service. Smart phones and text messages have become so ubiquitous and accepted that we seem to have silently arrived at the convention that shooting off a text message to someone is as good as calling them, either on the phone or even in person. Indeed, we say it is better, because text messages give the recipient the option of postponing a reply, even though we all quietly judge those people who take time to respond to messages, and will go ahead and imply all the social signals of a sudden conversational pause in the interim, while decrying those who use text messages to write monologues.
I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating after all the complaints I’ve given: I like text messages, and I even prefer them as a communication format. I even like, or at least tolerate, social media messaging platforms, despite having lost my appreciation for social media as a whole. But I am concerned that we, as a society, and as the first generation to really build the digital world into the foundations of our lives, are setting ourselves up for failure in our collective treatment of our means of communication.
When we fail to appreciate the limits of our technological means, and as a result, fail to create social conventions that are realistic and constructive, we create needless ambiguity and distress. When we assign social signals to pauses in communication that as often as not have more to do with the manner of communication than the participants or their intentions, we do a disservice to ourselves and others. We may not mention it aloud, we may not even consciously consider it, but it lingers in our attitudes and impressions. And I would wager that soon enough we will see a general rise in anxiety and ill will towards others.