A brief history of online messaging
“Let’s get drinks tonight?” you ask your friend. She listens, turns to another friend, has a quick conversation, and then turns back to you minutes later and says, “Yeah, getting drinks sounds good”. Something is off in this scenario and it doesn’t seem like an entirely normal conversation. And, in real life, it isn’t. But it happens over millions of texts, emails, social media platforms, and every other form of online communication you can think of, all the time. Online messaging let’s people respond at their leisure. It allows for the suspension of social reciprocity.
The text message is praised for giving people the time they need to craft well-thought out responses, while also enabling them to decide what they want to do and with whom they want to do it without the pressure of having to make an immediate decision. I can text three friends inviting them to lunch and have the power to decide which person I’d like to meet up with. If all three people text back, ready to grab lunch with me, there are three people now waiting on my confirmation of the date, suspending their lives by waiting for my response. Texting gives me the power over the situation, and takes time and attention from the people I’ve essentially crowdsourced to meet up for lunch.
People constantly complain about how distracting the inbound of online communication is. Push notifications are framed as the enemy of living in the moment and maintaining a focused life. There are even thought practices designed to teach people how to more effectively block out their time to prevent the distraction of inbound messages. Strategies include turning off notifications, scheduling specific times for checking email, and strictly limiting social media hours. But, while push notifications are extremely distracting, the underlying problem is in more than their invasive nature. It’s in the obligation for reciprocity that online messaging platforms foster. It’s in the fundamental difference between information and obligation overload. Yes, I might be getting hundreds of messages every day, but the deluge is only consuming my attention because those messages require my response.
“I know that he read my text”
We’ve all encountered the read receipt. It’s the chatting feature that shows that a message has been read, often accompanied by a timestamp specifying when. Some messaging platforms, such as iMessage and WhatsApp, allow the feature to be turned on and off, but with others, such as Facebook and Snapchat, it’s a fixed feature that clearly indicates that the message you’ve sent has been seen, and how the following interaction will unfold is left for the receiver of the message to decide.
Even without the read receipt, texting is rooted in the idea of control. “If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control,” writes Sherry Turkle in her book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk In The Digital Age. “And texting and email let us present the self we want to be. We can edit and retouch.” With read receipts on, this is brought to a whole new level. If the ellipsis of a typing bubble doesn’t immediately pop up once a message has been marked “read”, the sender is left to wonder why the person they’re messaging hasn’t responded, without the personal comfort of being able to imagine all the different reasons why the receiver wasn’t able to see the message. They have cold confirmation that the person that they messaged isn’t in fact napping, or working, or engaged in deep conversation with friends, because they very clearly have seen and ignored the message.
In a developing relationship, people don’t want to outpace each other in vulnerability. In 1971, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers introduced the theory of “reciprocal altruism” to describe the way in which cooperative partners reap the benefits of reciprocation. The concept is that in doing something to benefit you, I’m putting myself at a disadvantage, but I know that you will repay me by doing something to benefit me and then we’ll be equal — “you scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours.” According to the theory, if the favor isn’t immediately returned, the vulnerable party becomes even more vulnerable to being cheated out of a return favor, or a return text, but anger protects the vulnerable party against cheaters, by driving him to punish the cheater or end the relationship.
Read receipts are intentionally used as a mind game by some, a way to express disinterest or disdain and gain the upper hand in this grand power play of online communication. Single, young people and those who are casually dating tend to turn off their iMessage read receipts for this reason, whereas people in more established relationships tend to have them turned on more often. It becomes much more efficient to text your partner, “I’ll pick up the kids today” and immediately know that they’ve seen the message and are on the same page. TechCrunch writer Jordan Crook writes that her personal use of read receipts is for “professional convenience and productivity.” They make it easier for Crook to receive pitches on her phone, as her Read Receipts indicate one of two things to people: “1) they say that I have put your (insert request here) on my to-do list, or 2) they say that I have read your pitch and am still uninterested.” Since turning on the feature, Crook gets “less chatter” and fewer repetitive follow-up texts asking her if she’s seen a message.
Read receipts aren’t a new phenomenon. Far before the conception of online messaging platforms, people wanted to know whether their messages had been delivered. During the days of mail delivery on horseback, postal workers delivered “return receipts” to senders after delivering their letters and packages via Royal Mail. Registered mail, mail that is tracked at each point along its delivery route, dates back to as far as London in 1556 during the turbulent reign of Mary Tudor. In 1841, Great Britain introduced the system of green sheets — letters were sent in large sheets of green paper, which were then returned to the Post Office of origin to notify the sender of the successful delivery. Various methods built on green sheets over the decades, until the United States Post Office revolutionized the tracking of deliveries with electronic signatures in 2003.
Email adopted read receipts early on in the form of Message Disposition Notifications (MDNs) or Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs). DSNs only told the sender that the email had been delivered, while MDNs allowed the sender to see whether it had been opened, or just deleted without a glance. As long messages devolved into short texts, tracking a message became even more detailed. Apple rolled out read receipts in 2011 for use with iMessage in iOS 5, and Facebook added “seen” notifications to its messages the following year.
Most messages are written to be responded to. When a message you’ve sent is “read”, you expect to hear a response, just as you would after making a comment in a face to face conversation. While online messaging technically gives us the power to choose when we would like to pause a conversation, this conflicts with the back-and-forth flow of human interaction, known by psychologists as social reciprocity. Read receipts correct this conflict and take advantage of human nature by holding people accountable for responding to the messages they receive. Once your friend has been notified that you’ve read her message, based on how conversations work, you now feel that you “owe” a response to her. This inevitably causes your friend to come back to the messaging platform to see if you’ve responded yet, and if you haven’t, she will continue to check until you do.
The same concept accounts for the anticipation created by the wavy dots on Facebook signaling that a message is being typed. If you know that you’re about to get a message you might stay on Facebook a bit longer to wait for it, or at least come back later to check it out. Adam Alter, social psychologist and author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, says that this method of designing our social platforms is creating real addictions, to the point that platforms like Snapchat drive usage through engagement mechanisms more than they do through creating enjoyment for users. In addition to showing you when someone opens your snap, Snapchat uses “snapstreaks” to keep people playing the endless game of seeing how many days in a row they can snap the same friend, the reward being a number that keeps growing and growing day after day, a quantifiable measure of reciprocated Snapchat friendship and loyalty. It’s not necessarily the notification that you have received a Snapchat that keeps you engaged with the platform, but the conversational element that puts pressure on you not to drop the ball since your friend is juggling it with you. “It’s clear here that the goal — keeping the streak alive — is more important than enjoying the platform as a social experience,” Alter says.
“How many likes did it get?”
For the sake of my evolving online friendship, we’ll call her Sarah. Sarah started liking my tweets last year. We have 43 mutual Twitter followers and attend the same university, but have never met in person. At first I didn’t pay attention to her likes, but as they persisted, I started to expect them. If anyone was going to like my tweet, Sarah would, and when I received the Twitter notification that she did, I experienced a little burst of delight. I started liking her tweets back. When Sarah posted, I happily gave her a little tap of social media affirmation. We had started a Twitter friendship.
A couple months ago, Sarah sent me a friend request on Facebook. I don’t usually accept friend requests from strangers on the platform, but Sarah and I weren’t strangers anymore, we’d become Twitter friends. And now, a year later, still never having met, we’re also connected on LinkedIn. I think we have enough information to even endorse each other for “social media” skills quite fairly.
The desire to feel acknowledged and recognized drives people. When I follow someone on Twitter and they follow me back, it makes me feel as if they are equally as interested in my thoughts as I am in theirs, even if it was mere reciprocity of my gesture that prompted their follow. Former Google designer and ethicist Tristan Harris explains that companies like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat manipulate how people experience social approval online through their design choices. When someone tags you in a photo, you feel as if that person made a conscious choice to tag you, but you don’t see what the other person sees, Facebook automatically prompting the person to tag you with a one-click confirmation button. So, when your friend tags you, he’s not acting on a conscious decision, but merely responding to a Facebook suggestion, but that’s not the part that you think about because it’s invisible to you.
LinkedIn does this too. When you respond to an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that they value being connected with you. You don’t think about them mindlessly scrolling through their timeline and stumbling upon your profile with a big blue “+ Connect” button in the list of suggested contacts that they likely found you in. When someone endorses you for a skill that you have, LinkedIn suggests four other people that you can endorse in return. Like Facebook, LinkedIn’s design exploits the asymmetry in your perception of the situation, and creates new obligations for social reciprocity that you feel compelled to repay.
Facebook introduced the like button in 2009. YouTube followed suit with a binary like/dislike format in 2010. That same year, Instagram launched with a heart-shaped like button. Twitter finally caught up in 2015 and announced that “we are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we’ll be calling them likes. We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use … You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.”
Why is there so much focus on creating platforms that are “rewarding to use”? Because rewards are addictive. Users flock to Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and even their email with the hope that when they open the application, or refresh their screen, they’ll have something new and exciting to look forward to — something that needs their attention, and that’s exactly what the social platforms are begging for. In 1969, Economist Herbert A. Simon wrote that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
The “attention economy,” as it is called, is what drives social media and messaging platforms. According to Michelle Klein, Head of Marketing for North America at Facebook, the average adult checks their phone 30 times a day, and millennials check their phones more than 150 times. When Facebook can get you to come back to check in on a conversation that you know your friend will be responding to soon because she has “seen” it, Facebook is getting you to spend more time on the platform, and even you know that when you check in on that message you will also inevitably watch that funny BuzzFeed video that pops up on your timeline (but only one!) or like your friend Sarah’s photo that will end up giving her a notification and drawing her into Facebook too. It’s a simple business model: The more of your time that a platform can engage you for, the more effective its advertising space becomes, and the more it can charge advertisers for that space. If social feedback gives users an addictive burst of happiness that keeps them coming back for more, then of course Instagram wants you to be hyper-aware of how many likes you’ve gotten on your photo, or what kinds of comments it’s garnered. If Twitter can make you feel as if someone really loved your tweet rather than starred it along with a bunch of other mildly interesting tweets, then of course Twitter will change its social affirmation icon from a star to a heart. The more emotionally involved you are with how your social network is responding to you, the more you’ll care to check in and find out, and the more advertisers will pay for your eyeballs to hit their ads.
“Why do I keep typing into this empty box.”
Farhad Manjoo, Technology Columnist at The New York Times, tweeted this on May 25. At the time of writing this, Manjoo had received 95 likes, 16 retweets, and 9 replies, some of which were “I read it sometimes”, “For the extra rush of dopamine”, “somewhere someone is listening maybe”, and “For favs?” the last of which Manjoo responded to, “Pretty much”, and got 4 favorites on his response.
The concept of posting into the void that is social media began in 1978 with the first bulletin board system (BBS) called Computerized Bulletin Board System, developed by Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss. This was the first time in the brief history of the Internet that user-generated content became central to a service. BBS was an online version of a typical office bulletin board — in fact that’s where social media terminology like “posts” and “pinned” originate from — where users would log onto a particular board using a terminal program and upload or download data from it, finding and contributing things that interested them. BBS included public message boards, direct messaging, and even interactive games.
Though BBS had died down by the mid-1990s, Usenet, an international network for topical discussions, had already been established. Usenet, which is still active, structures topics in a hierarchical fashion, and allows users to subscribe to a particular topic, or newsgroup, based on interest. Unlike a forum which is stationed on a primary server, Usenet is a continuously evolving peer-to-peer network distributed amongst many servers with servers coming and going over time, similar to Richard Hendricks’ plans for how his decentralized ‘new internet’ will work on the Season 4 premiere of HBO’s Silicon Valley.
Similar to BBS and Usenet, forums serve as a centralized place for people to discuss topics, but in a much more specialized way and at a massive scale. In 1994, the W3 Consortium developed the first software for forum protocol, WIT, and for the first time, people were able to organize content around specific topics, which is now integral to how any website with any commenting system on the Internet works, including social media platforms. Around the same time as forums came into existence, online journals started popping up around the Internet. As their popularity grew, Webrings, collections of online journals organized around a certain theme, came into existence. By the mid-2000s, the web log, or blog, was born. With features like comments and feed subscriptions, blogging became a way to form online communities interested in similar topics, and allowed people to share their thoughts with the world.
The preferred method of online communication that dominates the current scene is social media, which combines the essential elements of forums, centralized locations for people to discuss the topics they’re interested in, with blogs, personal platforms for people to voice their thoughts and receive commentary. Twitter is actually known as a “microblog,” which is exactly what it sounds like, a blog made up of shorter content, such as single sentences, individual images, or video links.
Though social media naturally evolved from the days of BBS as a more seamless way to share information online, the culture around social media platforms has created behavioral dynamics that have transformed them into social validation feedback loops. The popularity of “stories” is a perfect example. Whether on Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook, people post stories as temporary content for all of their social media followers to see, without committing to the content in an actual post. On Snapchat, you might snap a cute video of your dog eating cheese and send it to your two friends, but then decide to add it to your Story as well in order to maximize the number of views and Snaps you might get in return. You only really care to share the Snap with your two friends, but if posting to your Story maximizes how many people you can get attention and, possibly, return Snapchats from, then why not? Stories are the perfect embodiment of what posting into the void of social media is.
Journalists have a target audience, but the greater their target audience is, the greater the chances they’ll get more page views. Comedians craft jokes for a specific crowd, but the greater that crowd is, the higher the likelihood that people will laugh at their jokes. The same goes for posting into the void. Much of what we post for everyone is not in everyone’s interest to see, but when posting a tweet is giving a chance for everyone on the Internet, or in your social network, to provide feedback on your thought, there’s a greater chance that you’ll get more feedback, and feedback is attention. Getting responses is validation that what you are posting matters. People like feeling like what they say is worth responding to.
“I just need to respond to this one text”
As online messaging increasingly evolves to mimic real life interactions, the problem of obligation overload becomes more and more apparent. The same way that you expect your friend to respond to you when you talk to her or text you back when you text her, you expect the friends in your social networks to respond to your social posts proportionally to how you would respond to theirs. But humans were never meant to reciprocate attention to so many people at once. When you’re involved in three iMessage conversations, two Facebook group chats, and a slew of other conversations on Slack, Twitter, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, not to mention the conversation with the real person sitting across from you at lunch and speaking to you out loud, the idea that you have to be engaged in all of the interactions at once is overwhelming.
Speaking with Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein on The Ezra Klein Show in April, Cal Newport, associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, explained that when information technology systems came into corporations in the late 1980s, they did help increase productivity. Finally, there was a backend solution that helped organizations organize all of their physical files into easily accessible databases. It was revolutionary to information technology. By the 2000s, businesses figured that if connecting the backend was so revolutionary, connecting the front end of businesses, people, would be even better, so they did. Newport thinks that we didn’t put enough thought into the way we did this and that’s why we’re not seeing any increases in our productivity, even though we feel like we must be accomplishing more since we’re constantly consuming information that’s coming our way, when in fact we’re just working much, much harder to keep up with this inbound information and trying to parse out the signals from the noise. “We’re inventing things that take a lot of our time but aren’t actually helping us make big breakthroughs, or get our work done in a higher quality way faster,” Klein said.
In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Newport writes about how important “depth” is in a lot of different fields. The ability to maintain deep focus on a cognitively demanding task over a long period of time is becoming more valuable as its supply is decreasing. The idea that everyone is expected to be available at any time caused by frictionless online communication creates the “hyperactive hive mind,” which is poorly suited to how our minds actually work. Slack, a team communication application launched in 2013 that provides real-time messaging, archiving, and search for teams, prides itself on bringing customers “an average 48.6% reduction in internal email, helping them enjoy a simpler, more pleasant, and more productive work life.” Though it’s an excellent communication tool, with 2.7 million DAUs as of April 2016, Slack is incredibly distracting. People that would normally think twice before knocking on an office door to ask a trivial question would not hesitate to send the same question over Slack, though the resulting notification is just as disruptive as an in-person interruption. Slack may be a great way to reduce internal email, but only because it’s design is better suited for people to engage with it in the same habit they have with their email — checking it all the time.
When IBM launched its first internal email system in the 1980s, so many people started using it that the mainframe melted down within two to three days of it being set up. The mere availability of the new technology drastically changed how the organization operated internally. In 2015, during the British Psychological Society’s annual conference, Sir Cary Cooper, professor of organizational psychology at Manchester Business School, said that one of the reasons Britain has the second-lowest productivity rate in the G7 is because of British workers’ constantly connected email culture. Email is a wonderful, useful technology — you can email anyone anywhere, instantly transfer information, and store and retrieve past communications — but it’s constant availability is destructive because it engages people in the constant fear of missing something important. Harris says that this is the same fear that keeps us subscribed to newsletters that haven’t provided much value to us recently, keeps us from “unfriending” people we haven’t spoken to in ages, keeps us swiping faces on dating apps even when we haven’t met anyone we like on them, and keeps us addicted to social media in general. “If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because (aha, I win) you might miss something important,” Harris writes. In other words, online communication is a lot like a slot machine. Every time I check my e-mail or open Facebook Messenger, there’s a chance I’ll win and have something important to give my attention to.
Unfortunately, this is a gambling problem that no one can win. Eventually, you have to get off of your email and get to doing the actual work required of you. Eventually, you have to stop swiping through Tinder profiles and go to sleep. We will always end up missing something in our online world when we inevitably will ourselves to shift our attention and give it to our real life, but because we know that our on-demand, attention-craving technology will need our attention at some point soon, we’re addicted to checking in to ensure that when that time comes along, we’re perfectly positioned to respond.
