Texting: The Weird Way

How will people react?

Introduction

The idea behind this experiment is to go against social norms. Texting is typing out messages to your friends using a keyboard on your phone. You do not talk to each other and hear voices; you just see words, videos, and photos. It is another way to socialize with someone else rather than talking to them on the phone.

I will be going against the social norm of trying to be interested in someone and try to constantly share what I am doing. The idea behind this is to get the person to react to me constantly sending them messages such as “I’m hungry” or “eating.” I will update the person more than usual.

Methods

I have chosen a few people to share too much information with them on my phone. They are not close friends but I am close enough to these people hopefully to get a reaction. I will begin by telling them what I do first at a random time. Then I will update them throughout the day to try and get a response. I am trying to get people to respond by constantly texting them. I am giving them every detail to try and get a response. I will try to make it as funny as possible. I will screenshot the responses I get. Hopefully I will get interesting responses to the experiment.

I think this is going to be fun! I hope the people I have a conversation with find it to be fun as well. I do not think they will, but I will give this a shot.

People Responding

I got a response from someone close to me! I texted way too much information to this person. This person is a relative of mine and a male adult. He played along with it and even texted way too much information back. We both had fun with it and here are the results.

As you can see, I talked about my life and updated him on my college experience. Both the person I talked to and I have a sense of humor. I found the spamming to be funny. He found the spamming to be annoying at first but then had fun with it. I said in the beginning that this weird way of texting would be fun and it was. I was laughing a lot at this conversation.

I also got a response from someone I know that is not a close friend; we just worked on a project together and this is a female student. I talked to this person about what I was doing. This person wasn’t as into it as my previous person, but the person still responded enough to get results. Again, it was fun texting this person so much. Here are the results.

Based on these results, I was concerned about what was going on in this person’s life just like the previous person. I told this person how I studied, ate, and went bowling. This person said life is good and wondered why I was so “chatty.”

I eventually told these people the purpose of this spamming. I talked to the relative on the phone about it. He understood the purpose of the spamming. He thought the purpose of the spamming was interesting.

The other person I texted the reason why I did this understood why as well. Here is the text back from the person I texted.

As you can see, this person thought it was funny that I had to do this for a project.

Observations

I have observed the similarities between the two people who responded. Both of the responders thought it was weird that I was texting them so much. Also, these people did not know in the beginning that I had a purpose for texting them so much. Therefore, they wanted to know the reason why I texted them everything I was doing. Once I told them the purpose, they understood what I was doing and why I was doing it.

The differences between the conversations caught my attention in a big way. The relative was totally involved in the conversation. We talked all about my experiences on APEX as well as other stuff going on in our lives. This person was completely interested in what I had to say. Meanwhile, the other person just said that life was good and thanked me for asking her if they needed any help.

Analysis

Even though the spamming got some laughs, the normal way to go about when texting someone is to text them and wait for a response. For example, you would want to have a conversation that starts with just “Hi” instead of what I said, which was “Hi, what’s up, what are you up to,” and other greetings bombarding the person with messages to begin the conversation. You would wait for the other person to respond. They may say “What’s up” or something to that nature. Then you would respond.

You would go back and forth until that person is busy or wants to stop texting. Then you would just text them at another time when they want and/or can talk. Then text the person like you would in a normal conversation.

You would not keep texting them your life story without them responding. For example, you would not text them “I’m hungry, I want food, About to go eat, doing homework,” and other activities. This bombarding of text messages made my experiment go outside the social norm of having a normal conversation.

I think this experiment truly showed how too much texting can cause people to respond differently than normal. For example, when I first spammed my first person he texted back “…” as if to say what are you doing. Normally they would text back “What’s up” when I normally said “Hi.” The second person texted back “why are you so chatty” instead of us going back and forth in a conversation.

Too much texting could cause people to respond negatively and they may even block your number. People do not want to be creeped out and they may get annoyed with all the messages. It is unethical to text so much because of the consequences of the action. In other words, it could be so much that people think they are harassed and there may be legal stuff involved.

Conclusion

Overall, the main idea of this norms breaching experiment was to go against social norms. I texted way too much to two relatively close people and that went against the social norm. People normally text each other back and forth instead of you texting a bunch of ideas before the other person responds. This may cause them to be creeped out or annoyed and they may block you. You may get awkward responses if you text the other person one thing after another.

I would be annoyed too if someone was constantly texting me their entire life story with messages coming right after the other before I could respond. If someone text bombs me, I would put my phone on silent at first, then if it keeps up, I would block the number. Now if I was having a normal conversation, then I would be happy to talk to the other person if it’s not a stranger.

I thought this was an interesting experiment. It took some courage to spam a person I barely know without getting blocked. I would hope no one would ever text bomb someone else for a long period of time. That could cause some trouble and may possibly send you to court and jail. People don’t need to harass others this way and shouldn’t. It would go against morals of decency to text bomb someone and harass them. I just don’t believe it’s right.