Notifications: the worst and only portals

AUGUST 7TH, 2016 — POST 216

I’ve spent a few stolen five minutes here, an ad break there this week getting to inbox zero. Well, no empty inboxes, nothing pushed into Archive or Trash. But I’ve made that little red badge disappear on the corner of the CloudMagic app on my iPhone and iPad, and the Canary menu bar unread count on my Macs. As much as I hate those red badges, my main email client is just not an app I’m ready to turn them off of. If they annoy me, it means I have to get something done, go through some emails, to clear it off. And as is renowned of iOS’s less-than-perfect notification system, banners and alerts are easily missed. Those annoying red badges might just be the last line of defence.

The notification has become an integral part of every modern operating system and most web browsers. Notifications are so fundamental to interacting with our devices that the notification shades on both iOS and Android are sites of constant innovation — all geared towards striking the best balance between actionability and dismissibility. One of the few compelling use cases for wearables, a segment of consumer electronics we were all convinced was to become The Next Big Thing™, is damming the notification flow — or at least making them more conveniently visible on the wrist. And for most people that flow only ever becomes more voluminous and as such more demanding.

Letting a phone ring in a movie is one of the simplest ways to create tension. That sound — an early incarnation of a technological notification — is unsettling. It demands to be halted, to be actioned upon. And the person making the call really is abhorrently rude: “You need to talk to me right now!” the ring says. But we accepted normalcy of the phone’s ring before I was born. The marvel that the telephone is — able to pipe sound across wires all over the world — is worth it. No one wants to roll out of bed at 3AM to pick up a ringing phone but, fuck, it’s New York calling. In raising that receiver to one’s ear, the whole world can be traversed (practically) instantly.

There are no shortage of pieces bemoaning the notification torrent. And it’s hard not to be caught up in the “This should be better” rhetoric. But it’s just as hard to actually do anything about it. We all know there are settings, toggles, unsubscribes we could hit to trim some notification flab but my guess is most of us don’t go digging to find them all too often. Whilst these settings are invariably buried, my sense is the difficulty in stemming the notification tide isn’t tied to this. Rather, we just can’t bear to miss out.

And what we might be missing out on is as monumental a marvel as talking to New York from Sydney at 3AM. Turning off notifications is shutting out pinholes of access to a digital world we’re increasingly inhabiting. The notification, as brutalist as it often feels, is the best way we’ve come up with to permit digital eruptions into the physical world. The notification tells us that our second world is still turning. Our worlds are inherently separate. Is it any wonder the blips of their bleeding together can feel so violent?

Wearables, augmented reality: technologies whose promises lie fundamentally in smoothing the digital eruptions. We might have reached the limit with the vibration motor, the audio cue, and the condensed display of a notification on a multitouch display that we now require new hardware to solve this problem. But whilst wearables and augmented reality could each be pointed to as the future of consumer electronics, the paradigm is more essential than that. Whatever hardware comes to instantiate it, the next paradigm will be defined by its capacity to enmesh digital and physical worlds more efficiently than they are currently.

Notifications, for the most part, are nothing more than annoying. But to turn them off is to reject a good chunk of yourself.