How Good Messaging Will Heal Society
By Anna Gát — CEO and co-founder at Actual
Being part of happy relationships that are sustainable in the long run seems to be a basic ingredient for a satisfied life.
Yet human relationships feel complicated because we expect them to satisfy us on multiple axes:
- We are happiest (or least stressed) in relationships that work both on a group level and as one on ones.
- We want our relationships to provide both momentary comfort and entertainment, and to last across changing eras in our life, strengthening the inner narrative of our identity.
And that’s just our relationships’ inner structure. The contemporary reality in which we exist also presents a number of well-known challenges:
- Prolonged adult education
- National, global migration for studying and work
- The disappearance of small communities
- Abundance of solitary entertainment
- Working in the gig economy
- Living with temporary housemates
- (Add your own)
Even one of these could cause a major upheaval in our emotional lives, yet most of us tackle a grueling combination of 4 or 5 every single day like a boss.
But this is not all. There’s a far less visible and more vicious disruptor of our social networks: the very form of communication that was supposed to fortify them.
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As of today, online communication has three main forms:
- social media (no.1 function: semi-private or public self-broadcasting)
- forums (no.1 function: semi-private or public group discussion)
- messaging (no.1 function: replaced the fully private one on one letter/phone call)
It has been widely studied that humans want these three forms of online communication the most. Especially successful providers — like Facebook or Twitter — have managed to incorporate elements from all three into their services, and thus aggregate more users.
Of the three communication forms, this article will concentrate on messaging — more precisely happy messaging, as that is our expertise at Ixy.
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What’s the problem with “messaging”, you may ask. It sure looks innocent, practical and fun — a lot of smart people have worked to make it that way. Yet humans seem to know it’s a very dangerous tool. The overwhelming majority of the people we asked have had disastrous experiences in chat apps and have made strict rules for themselves — but still, no one knows exactly how to behave when messaging.
So why do we fear disaster and chaos in Whatsapp, Messenger, etc…?
Our phones are annoying.
If a means of communication is itself a source of irritation, any exchange on it will be risky. Let’s face it, more often than not message threads are interrupting and demanding. Any message is mostly unexpected or has unexpected elements. It startles us out of our physical context, which further amplifies its shock effect.
We react with varying levels of patience: We try to keep in mind what numerous threads are about. We try to keep talkative connections at bay. We type reluctantly under our desks. We become uncharacteristically short with people. We think we’re being funny but it ends up misconstrued. We’re being friendly and someone takes it for romantic interest. We develop our own version of passive aggression and hope to get away with it.
Every morning we wake up and see who has been talking to us while we were sleeping (or swimming or in the shower). There’s never a moment of break, and we have almost zero control over the timing and tone — we really can only control when we pay attention to things that happen beyond us— and even that has become a challenge.
This constant messaging activity takes a toll on our inner lives, and even more on the quality of our relationships. We lose people, lose out on people or hurt/are hurt by people only *because* of the platform of communication. This is a completely new situation in the long history of human innovation.
You can, of course, choose to restrict yourself to interacting purely via photos and other visuals, but information is king, and chances are that soon you will need to express something more complicated —with words.
This doesn’t mean we will stop chatting anytime soon —
and for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is privacy: humans are impulsive beings and the fact that chatting leaves a “paper trail” that can become a risk later on seems a smaller issue at the moment than how much we don’t want the people around us at home, at work, on public transport, or at the café to hear what we’re saying. We also prefer to have multiple conversations at the same time. And so the typing, though warily, continues.
We also don’t want to give up something so entertaining. Sure, some of our friends and relations turn into unmanageable liability during messaging, but we get to like ourselves in writing. We feel more in power over how we’re perceived and learn fast to be funnier and more articulate this way. We want to send witticisms, links and gifs, and feel good about how well-informed we are. This unfortunately means that when messaging breaks down, this ambition we had to learn how to be “cool” makes it all the more painful.
Chatting is a selective force in our lives.
What happens during messaging has a strong effect on our offline relationships.
- We may notice that a friend is uncaring or dismissive only when seeing their words…
- We may not find the right persona to use with someone and they get offended…
- We may have just blocked a person who posted/tweeted something not OK, making chatting with them off-limits…
- There may be a general incompatibility between our messaging needs and speed, leading to frustration…
People with whom our messaging has collapsed will be unlikely to remain offline friends. It’s not like, “Oh, we got into a huge fight online, but when we meet IRL, all will be fine.”
In 2018, it’s clear that only the people with whom we can chat successfully will stay in our lives at all. That’s a massive, significant new phenomenon — a new “selector”— which does as much to reshape our social networks as anything in social media or forums, if not more.
Whenever we block or unfriend someone because of a chat-based communication breakdown, or an activity outside messaging which makes us not want to message them ever again, our social structure gets one bit more disrupted.
At Ixy we’ve come to notice that many of the silos we see around us — the partisanship, antagonism and inability to sustain dialogues — begin or first manifest in such one on one breakdowns.
You’re a node in a network where the other nodes are all the people you can civilly exchange words with. Losing parts of it constantly is not a technological, but a personal negative outcome.
Today, chatting is being introduced as a normal part of office life, not to mention new initiatives to make you chat to your doctor, therapist, lawyer and customer service or tax advisor…
Amazingly, even though all evidence suggests we are desperately unprepared to conduct even our personal affairs in messages (and so end up unfriending or anonymously bullying each other, or simply self-censoring), we will now use this problematic form of communication in all areas of our existence.
How to stop messaging from breaking down our relationships?
As you surely noticed, it’s super easy to ruin a relationship in messages, but impossible to repair them within this communication form.
Older people will say, “Oh, just call them”, “Meet for a beer”, but the problem is once the harm has been done in writing, you often don’t feel like speaking IRL at all. Because of brutally honest forum etc. experiences, our gut says our friends are more outspoken in writing, and we feel that now meeting in person where they can “act” won’t make this moment of honesty magically disappear.
But it’s not the social media filter bubbles or angry redditors that reshuffle our society in the first place, but our invisible, private, “unimportant” chat threads with each other. It’s not “them” — it’s you and me.
It’s in our one on one communication where allegiances will be decided, where partnerships will be broken, where silos could be connected.
It’s into this intimate space where the tech leaders we like to criticise don’t venture — and so human dialogue is facilitated but not supported, and you’re left alone with the clean-up, which inevitably means losing people that matter to you.
At Ixy we know that humans need a place where messaging can be about:
- jointly choosing the tone and the tempo
- allowing for negative or unexpected feelings
- actually understanding the other person
- being comfortable with being yourself
- having a safety net for staying connected in the long term
- enjoying a space where daily human issues can be resolved together — where all chatters can be partners instead of opponents
The tools we’re building are a lifeboat for your relationships.
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Ixy is building a stress-free messaging platform for happier relationships.
We use AI to mediate and support more meaningful conversations on your phone.
Sign up to try soon at getixy.com.
Follow us on Twitter at @IxyHelps.
