How Messaging Has Changed Human Interaction

Small losses of privacy have rewritten the rules of messaging and changed how humans feel about each other

Illustration courtesy of the author

Few applications have affected mass consumer psychology as much as messaging apps. While social media helps us build communities, a following, and a digital presence, messaging enables us to stay in touch with people we care about. With the ongoing trend of more intimate and personal communication, a myriad of privacy scandals, and general social media fatigue, messaging is here to stay.

When looking at it from a distance however, it seems like messaging hasn’t really changed all that much over the last two and a half decades. It’s easy to overlook the small design and privacy changes that fundamentally rewrote the rules of communication and how we feel when we talk to one another.

To better understand how we ended up where we are today and to fully appreciate the psychological ramifications of a series of seemingly small changes, we need to take a step back and go back to 1996 — the year when messaging as we know it started.

In the early ’90s, five Israeli developers realized that most non-Unix users had no easy way to send instant messages to one another. The terminal was reserved for power users, and well-designed…