Prove you’ve read this

That a message has been seen but not responded to is always a source of mild alarm.

One can hardly help fretting: that little notification, the read-receipt, suggests volumes of secret grievances and resentments unaired; it provokes tidal waves of panic and selfdoubt. The silent partner on the other end of the Facebook chat or iMessage – that friend, colleague or lover gone suddenly taciturn before our humble entreaties – has accepted delivery of our communique. Every minute without an answer is a lifetime of enmity manifested in deliberate nonresponse. We all suspect that we’re privately hated. The read-receipt allows us to measure how much.

Of course there are many reasons why we may not respond to the messages we receive the very moment we receive them, most of which have nothing to do with heretofore undeclared animosity. But so ingrained already are these anxieties that the read-receipt terrorizes us, seizing upon our insecurity and threatening to torpedo any confidence we’ve mustered.

So aware are we of the peril looming over the read-but-unanswered message that we’ve even developed sophisticated workarounds: we know how to peruse the banner alert without triggering the read-receipt notification. These are such sensitive matters that we’ve all devised personal systems of reading without letting our correspondents know. It makes one wonder why we’ve agreed to embrace read-receipts at all. Is this a necessary tyranny? Have social relations improved in any regard under this oddly pernicious system? Perhaps there are those who enjoy at least the certainty afforded by the read-receipt – even if it’s the certainty only of being scorned. Maybe there’s some comfort in knowing: we can’t delude ourselves into believing the unanswering paramour simply never received our yearning texts.

The truth is written communication doesn’t work without a degree of chronological latitude – without the freedom to respond to those who write to us at our leisure. A letter never had a fixed date of arrival; the letter back, therefore, we could never anticipate, which induced a kind of reassuring ignorance. As our modes of communication have become more immediate, so too have they grown more urgent. But urgency is too demanding: we find ourselves oppressed by our own desire to chat.