Breaching Texting Norms
Abstract & Introduction:
The purpose of this experiment is to break and breach social norms, deviating from the “typical” and “usual” ways we use communication technologies today. Seeing the reactions to violations of cultural standards in texting shows how essential our unspoken SMS rules have become. It’s also important to understand how norms affect technology, and how technology cultivates our accepted practices. The results and analysis will answer, “What’s wrong with violating norms?” and “Does technology adapt to us or vice versa?” I argue that as the latter progresses, the former then changes to suit our needs.
After a 72-hour research period of overwhelming three individuals with texts, I considered several factors, which might explain the differences in each person’s reaction. Length of time since my last conversation with the individual, closeness and history with a person, as well as personality type, seem to be the most prominent causes of disparity. Factors, such as race and gender play a minor part. Age may be a factor as to why an individual would respond to texts, but it isn’t a useful variant in this instance. Overall, I discovered that the longer the experiment ran its course, the less likely Persons A, B, or C was to respond. There is a point when “enough is enough” in texting overload.
Method:
Overview of task
For three days, I became an “oversharer.” I scrolled through my contacts to find three people, who would bring different results. Over the course of this time, I sent a series of disconnected, updating texts to the chosen lot. Ultimately, each experiment ended with the same result, but throughout the day, persons A-C showed differing responses to my over-sharing. I chose Person A, “Tony Goldwyn,” a 21 year old Temple University senior, whom I went to high school with. My last conversation with Tony was in 2012. Person B, whom I will refer to as “Kerry Washington,” 22, is a family member, and soon to be Cabrini College graduate. I talk to Kerry inconsistently and only on occasion. My third unaware participant, Person C, or “Bellamy Young,” is a 21-year-old fellow Saint Joseph’s University senior that I knew for four months while studying abroad in Spring 2014.
The way I chose to first approach the experiment is by choosing individuals with variants. That is, contacts of different genders, personality types, race, and their relation to me would, in my mind, produce contrasting results. After the selection, I started a 24-hour trial period with the only male, Tony Goldwyn. This avalanche of texting began in the morning, not long after I woke up, and ended around the same time the following morning. During the 6–7 hours of sleeping, no texts were sent. Essentially, I lathered (texting overload), rinsed (slowed down frequency of messages then came to a halt), and repeated (morning move to next individual, Kerry). The cycle then repeated for a third time.
In terms of how I texted, I tried to stick to several guidelines, which include:
1) Only remark on my current every day activities and feelings.
2) Don’t respond to an individual’s inquiries or concerns.
3) Halt constant updates only when a person begins to get suspicious, or when unable to text due to class and bouts of homework. Begin again when safe or free to do so.
4) Keep updates light and mostly short but also frequent.
I didn’t take written notes throughout the course of the experiment. However, I took constant screenshots of the conversations, or lack thereof, between the contact and myself. At the end of the experiment, I held a short question and answer with the individuals via text. In this short time, I confessed that I was performing an experiment, then asked for general reactions, and answers to more specific questions such as, “Why did you continue to respond?” or “What did you think while it was happening?” The answers to these question will appear later in the analysis and discussion sections.
Results:
Let’s look at my first case, the conversation with Tony Goldywn. Although you cannot see the entirety of his texts, the Temple student was the most likely to “play along. ” He was also apt to make sure I had the “right” man. I did. For the majority of the experiment, Tony seemed confused. I began texting at 9:07 am on October 7, 2014, and concluded at 8:08 am on October 8th. He stopped responding at 10:20 pm with a simple, “Laying in my bed,” which was his 10th reply.
On Day 2 of the experiment, I began texting Kerry at 8:31 am on October 8th, and stopped the following morning at 9:07 am, saying “It’s a bright, sunny day today!” Though my texts were frequent, her responses were scarce. Overall, she responded only 4 times. Thus, my cousin becomes the unresponsive ignorer.
Finally, there’s Bellamy. Bellamy was the most active participant, responding 16 times, and often questioning, and becoming suspicious. On the 9th at 11:04am, I started lathering and I rinsed, or stopped around 11:59 am on October 10th. The SJU hawk ceased communication at 8:20 pm on the first day. Bellamy’s greatest concern was if I was all right. Also, because she knew I was prone to weirdness in the past, her suspicions died down.
The most evident and one of few similarities between these three individuals is that all three began ignoring me after a certain time at night. Other interesting results flowed from this experiment. During our quasi-conversation, Tony contacted another mutual acquaintance, also a Temple student from our high school, who I’ll call “Cyrus,” whom I had just reconnected with on Facebook only months prior. Similarly, Bellamy, in the midst of constant text, wished she had my boyfriend’s number to discuss my odd behavior.
Considering the differences between Bellamy and Tony’s reactions, I considered gender as the reason. Is it a stereotype or fact that men text less than women? According to a 2010 Nielsen Co. survey, women do actually text more often than men, sending 601 SMS messages compared to a male’s 447 texts per month. A study written in Computers in Behavior, also reported that same sex contact, i.e., between Bellamy and I, is often frequent. But, when opposite sex, rather than male-to-male contact is considered, gender makes little difference in overall communication, which may be one reason Tony also responded to me. Had I been a male acquaintance, he might have been less likely to respond. Additionally, men prefer texting for social situations compared to women, which might explain his playing long and continuing until 10:20 pm (Forgays, Hyman, & Schreiber).
Gender made a minute effect on communication, especially when considering my cousin, Kerry, the ignorer. But seeing as Kerry is African-American, I thought perhaps race would factor into the equation, which it did not. In fact, the Nielsen survey says that African Americans are one of the most text-frequent races. So, why then did I only receive 4 texts from her? Personality is a key factor here, which will be brought up in the following section.
Analysis:
As noted in the abstract, this experiment is designed to breach social norms, which I happily did in the name of science. One broken norm in over sharing texts is that conversation becomes one-sided, which negatively affected Bellamy. Because I disregarded the “expectation of reciprocation,” she became annoyed, and yet still curious, prompting her replies(Barlow, 12). What was the effect of not answering this expectation? The contact felt like I was “leaving her hanging” (Barlow, 12).
Another norm breached was the style and construction of my text messages. Bellamy and Kerry agreed that my messages felt like impersonal Facebook updates. The main reason Kerry didn’t respond to my text is because she felt I was “tweeting random shit at her” instead of having an actual, in depth conversation. Furthermore, the content of the text didn’t fit with normal themes such as “social arrangements (I never asked to have coffee with Bellamy), friendship maintenance (I wasn’t apologizing to Tony for not keeping in touch), or relational informative texts (I didn’t discuss a family issue or concern with Kerry)” (Barlow, 13).
Texting is a form of communication that gives us the ability to get in touch with our close friends and family. ‘Close’ is the operative word here, because it explains how I breached yet another social norm. Angela Barlow says in Adult Texting in Context that texting is also used (among youths) to maintain relationships with acquaintances (Barlow, 9). But, society and my contact may think it odd to, on a whim, text a very old friend (Tony) from high school, to say what I had for breakfast, which I told him was Oops All Berries.
While I broke several societal standards of communication, I did keep one norm, which is worth noting. Overall, my text messages were short, concise messages. They weren’t anecdotal. Why not break all of the rules? Because, for the sake of results, keeping messages as easy reads was helpful.
Discussion & Conclusion:
As I alluded to in the results, personality affects the use of cell phones. It is the leading factor of differences in this experiment. For each individual, it’s important to ask, “Is the person, “extroverted, conscientious, agreeable, or open to experience”(Lee, 85)? The answers to these questions may clear up confusion about why contacts did or didn’t respond. It’s time to pick the “Scandal” cast apart. It is because Tony is typically open to experience that he responded freely, and without care. It is because Kerry is an extroverted person that she “is always busy, not often on her phone, and prefers face-to-face human interaction.” It is because Bellamy is both conscientious and agreeable that she first suspected that this was an experiment early on as well as decided to continue texting because she wouldn’t be as “comfortable” ignoring me as she would be with, say, her sister or her best friend. She reported that, if a relationship were tight, “ignoring would be more expected.” This might answer the question as to why Kerry refused to answer my texts.
This refusal of texts leads to the last examination of the experiment. Why did each participant eventually stop texting and start ignoring me? To fully answer this, it may help to read Jeremy Keeshin’s, Social Norms on the Web. In it, there is the idea of punishment, and a broken windows theory (Keeshin, 11). The theory says that minor bad behavior may lead to worst behavior. People should be expected to behave well. Thus, to punish me for my bad behavior, my breaching of norms, all three contacts ignored me, in the end. Perhaps, responding, in their minds, would encourage me to continue. My constant overcommunicating needed to stop.
If we follow along Jeremy Keeshin’s ideas about social norms, it’s possible that once SMS creates new forms of technology and communication, texters use those forms and make judgments. SMS then adapts to changing or instilled norms. For example, SMS creates a way to converse through 160 character text messages, an idea which people accept and abide by. The problem arises from norm breakers like myself, who chose to go against what society had accepted by taking the norms of another social media site, i.e., Twitter, and transfer it to this texting medium. Though my bad behavior was punished during the experiment, my results were rewarding. In them is an analysis of unspoken but well-known norms related to a particular communication technology.
Reactions after the Confession:
(Left: To Bellamy/ Right: To Tony)
Bibliography:
Barlow, Angela. “Adult Texting In Context: Exploring Norms for Mature Users of Text-Messaging Technologies.” MA thesis East Tennessee State University, 2008. Web. 14 Oct. 2014.
Forgays, Deborah Kirby, Ira Hyman, and Jessie Schreiber. “Texting everywhere for everything: Gender and age differences in cell phone etiquette and use.” Computers in Human Behavior 31 (2014): 314–321. Print.
Keeshin, Jeremy. “Social Norms on the Web: How to Create Productive Digital Communities.” The Web. N.p., 7 June 2010. Web. 13 Oct. 2014. <http://thekeesh.com/docs/norms.pdf>.
Lee, E. B.. “Facebook Use and Texting Among African American and Hispanic Teenagers: An Implication for Academic Performance.” Journal of Black Studies45.2 (2014): 83–101. Print.
“Newswire .” African-Americans, Women and Southerners Talk and Text The Most in the U.S.. N.p., 26 Aug. 2010. Web. 21 Oct. 2014. <http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2010/african-americans-women-and-southerners-talk-and-text-the-most-in-the-u-s.html>.
