My Week in Text Messages
Texting has provided the most convenient way of communication for me in the recent years. As my friends moved away for college and my sisters moved out of the house, our main form of communication between each other has been texting. Not to mention that me and my significant other are long distance and I think that’s something that wouldn’t be possible without that line of communication as we both go about our day.
In the span of a week, I had a total of 54 text conversations among five different groups of people in my life. This number didn’t surprise me at all, I am constantly on my phone and updating everyone on what I’m doing, if anything I was surprised that this number wasn’t any higher. I would mark each conversation finished while recording my data if either the conversation came to a natural conclusion or there was four or more hours between the last response and the start of the new conversation. When it came to the length of the conversation, I split the data into categories of 0 to 5, 5 to 10 texts, 10 to 20 texts, and over 20 texts. The categories that the conversation fell into dictated how long the vertical bar was. The rest of the data collection was self-explanatory with things like who texted first and if a picture was included jotted down in my notes app.
It was interesting to see the patterns that emerged from collecting and visualizing my texting habits. Some of these trends I was aware of, but never really thought about until I was lying out the data. For example, I know that my boyfriend texts me every morning when he wakes up and then we tend to have conversations at night right before bed. This type of routine was heavily reflected when visualized and from it I realize that I don’t tend to hold long conversations with anyone other than my boyfriend. The group of people that I texted most often was my friends, which comes as no surprise because there was around ten people in the category rather than the more limited groups like my significant other or my family. Another thing that I learned during my week of tracking is that I need a better work and life balance. I realized that the only time that I was texted by my coworkers, or I texted them were in the middle of days that I didn’t work, meaning that even when I was off the clock, I was still being asked questions about work.
Another element that came into play while collecting my data was how I felt while having these conversations. I originally set out to track my mood while having each conversation but quickly realize that it was not as interesting as I thought it was going to be due to the neutral nature of most of my conversations. What I did notice during this time was that when I was having a particularly emotional conversation, happy or sad, my character count would skyrocket. From a response of a few words all the way to an entire block paragraph.
Overall, I felt that every time I went to pick up my phone to text anyone I was more conscious about what time it was and how long the conversation went on for which may have influenced some of my data collection at first but I still feel as if my normal habits were well represented in these visualizations.
