Texting is all about connection
I don’t know how it is with your friends, but with mine, it’s mostly texting. Some of my relationships are supplemented by direct messages on Twitter and Instagram, and I used both Slack and WhatsApp until I simplified my iPhone screen.
But most of my ongoing, online communication — with my husband, my friends, my parents, my sisters, my next-door neighbours, my therapist, my dog-walker — happens in bubbles of blue and green.
Every iteration of messaging, from ICQ to Signal, has brought with it promises of better connection, but even in this era — “late-stage internet?” — texting persists as the most obvious, the universal option, with the lowest threshold for participation.
The conflict of texting is that everyone does it, and everyone wants to do it differently. We never got around to signing an updated social contract when we started carrying computers in our pockets.
The usual conflicts — the ur conflict in relationships, really — of “how to communicate” is, with texting, layered with the more practical conflict of “how to communicate.” Connection is a, or the, great social predictor of contentment, resilience and longevity, but when everyone has a hotline to their friends’ hands, eyes and attention — and most texting is on-tap, on the home screen, unfiltered and unignorable — the realities of our different needs, and the schedules of those needs, is way too apparent. The texter is implicated in how their textees understand and actually use their phones.
One friend of mine doesn’t want to receive texts late at night, and believes the onus is on the sender to consider the time; I think that everyone should be responsible for their own smartphone-management, and that alerts and alarms and notifications are now a part of general life maintenance. I leave my phone, and its hissing insistencies, alone at whatever time I feel like the day has just had enough — could be mid-afternoon, could be eight, but I don’t see after-hours texts until the early morning. (I don’t hesitate to respond to something at five a.m., because that’s when I got it, and if you don’t want to get a text at five a.m., turn your stuff off.)
I don’t love voluminous texting. I mean, I text my husband when we’re home and apart so I don’t have to go upstairs or downstairs when I am very likely ensconced with the dog or a book. But overusing my phone bugs my fingers — “text claw” is the internettechnical term — and I’ve become obsessed with what screens are doing to my vision. The autocorrect I have set up is more dystopian fantasy than tool.
The contemporary habit of downgrading some of the most important swaths of life to whatever a text can accommodate bums me out. Like most kinds of online communication, texting both solves and creates human problems; a smartphone is both a nexus and a nadir. But, when someone doesn’t reply to a text, a text that I know has been twinkling, adrift, only two clicks away from them, I become furious, even though I owe people emails from the Obama years, a whole lifetime behind us.
Text is best as a communiqué that needs a few words, not a phone call, and not cancellations, deflections and hard news made easier by the facelessness of text, and as dopamine blasts of care, interest and fun.
What I want out of texting, and all messaging, is, like, bonus episodes of my relationships. My ideal text-ship is the one I have with a friend who I will call “Erika,” in honour of one of the Real Housewives we diligently follow: we text often, but not always, sending gossipy gumballs that we would have missed in a pre-smartphone age, but texting hasn’t replaced our real-life hangs.
My other favourite texter is my dad, because he doesn’t really know how to do it, or care, but occasionally comes through with a novella of an update.
I’m psyched for my group chats until I check in, find the convo hundreds of messages deep, and check back out, but once in a while, like when I sent a group text to my mom and dad and sisters when I resolved a medical thing — a relief, but not something I would have called them about — and was met with a cascade of celebratory emojis, they seem like the whole point.
Everyone should be responsible for their own smartphone-management, and alerts and alarms and notifications are now a part of general life maintenance