But thanks to the sheer volume of messages that people send and receive and the unbridled accessibility smartphones now permit, it’s important to remember the difference between the two. In-app features like read receipts and bubbles that indicate someone’s typing are no doubt meant to aid technology in mimicking real-time conversation. But does any of this come as a surprise when many of us are expected to drop everything to reply to a work email on a Saturday morning, answer an Instagram DM the moment we’ve read it, or respond to a meme a friend texted at whatever odd hour? “OMG, hahahahaha, so me!” I frantically type back, straight-faced, robotically fulfilling my duty as a virtual friend. Meanwhile, a recent survey published by the American Psychiatric Association reveals that 39 percent of adults believe they are more anxious than they were last year, and another study by NCBI found that people feel more addicted to their phones every year.
I can hardly imagine how much those numbers have skyrocketed in the past four years. In 2014, an average of 18.7 billion texts were sent each day according to Text Request, while the daily amount of messages sent on other apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp accumulated to more than 60 billion. How can we learn to disentangle our lives from notifications if we can’t let it slide when our friends attempt to do exactly the same thing?
But while the desire to receive a response to messages instantly seems widespread, so does the growing urge to use technology mindfully. The dreaded blue WhatsApp ticks that confirm a message has apparently been ignored are now regarded as one of the worst social media snubs to endure. Many a meme about what it feels like to be temporarily ghosted by an unresponsive friend populates the internet. But still, 93 messages from friends, family and various group chats remain, and it’s making me feel a bit sick. Around 300 of them are likely emails from Net-A-Porter reminding me not to forget the items I abandoned in my basket during a fantasy shopping spree. To be clear, the absurd number of notifications I have is not a result of my popularity (the most exciting thing I did this weekend was visit my housemate’s office to borrow her keys after locking myself out of our house again). In other words, my day is already weighed down by anxiety and feelings of social guilt, and I haven’t even made it out of bed yet. T’s Sunday morning, and I’ve awoken to a grand total of 393 red notification badges invading my impeccably organized iPhone home screen.
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