Left on read

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I am not about to succumb to the tyranny of WhatsApp etiquette. I’ll get back to you – eventually.

According to my teenagers, I show bad form on social media. My crime is this: I don’t believe I have to respond immediately when I receive a WhatsApp. I can hear my phone bleep, but I ignore it until it suits me to pick it up. Sometimes I read my messages only before bed, and then, surmising that the senders are probably already asleep, I switch off, planning to respond in the morning. I even remember to do so on occasion. As a result, I regularly leave my senders ‘on read’.

If you’ve not heard this term before, let me enlighten you. ‘Blue ticking’ is the act of reading a WhatsApp message and not responding immediately. The sender can see that it’s been read, but no reply has arrived.

To ‘blue tick’ someone is considered (by some) to be the height of rudeness – and can even trigger unease. A quick Google session revealed a number of articles on the subject. One of these provides step-by-step instructions on how to turn read receipts off so your contacts can’t see whether you’ve read their messages or not, thus eliminating the pressure to respond. Another gives readers an inside tip: apparently, you can sidestep a read receipt by putting your phone on airplane mode.

So much effort, and for what? If a message is terribly urgent, surely you’d pick up the phone and dial a number – you’d have an actual conversation?

Perhaps my thinking is just hopelessly retro. A colleague recently tried to convince me to use the WhatsApp desktop app. I shuddered in horror. Always on? Always contactable? While I’m at work? No thanks. Far too invasive for me.

My behaviour is unthinkable to the adolescents in my life, but as my online findings prove, my home isn’t the only place where this is a contentious issue. Other teenagers I spoke to also feel the pressure of responding immediately to messages. Sixteen-year-old Chloe, who uses WhatsApp every day, feels uncomfortable and guilty when she doesn’t reply at once. ‘It’s like I’m ignoring the person,’ she says. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. Perhaps not. I know plenty of people my age who are familiar with ‘blue ticking’ and who see red when their peers leave them on read.

During a heated debate, my kids were at pains to say (shout) that answering messages only when I feel like it is rude and ‘it doesn’t work like that’. But who sets these rules? And who says I have to follow them?

This is a familiar topic in a new guise. In an article querying ‘Why no one answers their phone any more’, the author points us to ‘The Telephone Pledge’, distributed in the early 20th century to customers of US telephone company, AT&T. It reads: ‘I will try to be as Courteous and Considerate over the Telephone as if Face to Face.’ It also discourages answering with ‘Hello’.

Rules for conduct are nothing new. But manners can be applied to both sides of the argument. It can also be argued that it’s impolite of the sender to expect that the receiver will drop everything to respond to a message. And some conversations conducted via WhatsApp require thought and time.

My short exploration of the history of the telephone taught me that all communication technologies have had rules applied to them. Some have stuck, others haven’t. Norms evolve and rules change. ‘Hello’ is the acceptable telephonic greeting now. So maybe it’s not terribly important to respond to that message notification right this minute…