Connect the Dots

One of the features I absolutely despise and love at the same time about social media is precisely what Kati talks about in her post quasi-synchronous stress. There is a feature on Facebook and if you have iMessage for the iPhone, and maybe other types of phones I just do not know about, where you can see if the person is typing or not.

I despise this feature in messages because it is a strange invasion of privacy to me. Why does someone need to know that I’m typing, won’t they get the message soon enough? It seems so strange to me. And sometimes, as Kati says, it absolutely excruciating because it is just there for a long time. And of course I analyze it: why did they stop typing, are they typing a really long message, why haven’t they responded YET???!

The one thing I do hate more than this is the “Read (Time)” option, when the other person can see when the message was read. That one is so terrible because you can see if someone just blatantly ignores you, whereas otherwise, you get the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you don’t have your phone or its out of sight. But with that option, you know they saw it and just decided not to respond, and that’s truly an awful and anxiety-inducing feeling. I would say this is definitely worse than the typing alert hands-down, but both are weird to me.

Now just today, I found this incredibly useful as I was wondering if a study session was worth my time since I was going to be late. So what did I do? I sent out mass texts (and by mass I mean 3) to people in my class I thought would be there. I hoped their responses would let me know if I should try and get my butt to this review session or if I should just skip it. I had no way of knowing if they would respond either… until I saw the little “…” bubble in two of the conversations, and I felt instantly relieved. Someone was in the process of responding to me! I had no worry about whether they would respond or not- I could see that they were doing that.

Although I am not fond of these settings, Kati made me think of this in a different light. They want the message to simulate real conversation, so by seeing the other person typing, it creates a more-natural, back-and-forth dialogue then just sending a text message. I find messaging to be a completely different ball park in terms of conversation anyways, and I feel that this setting further takes the spontaneity out of conversation. It is not like a face-to-face conversation because someone can prepare what they will say in advance. No matter what, I always prefer human interactions to any kind.

Will we ever know...?

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