I’m a horrible texter. My friends complain about me not looking at the videos they send me when they mention a joke from a TikTok later in conversation. I’m a chronic do not disturb user. I’ll get a notification, look at it, tell myself, “I’m going to read what that says and then reply to it,” and then I leave the little number telling me how many unread messages I have to sit and grow for three days. This is obviously a very bad habit of mine. Still, there are codes and rituals that we as digital natives take part in every time we respond to someone in text or interpret someone else’s response in text
The Medium is the Message
I have 8 different platforms on my phone that I use to text people with regularity and I definitely feel like my replying tendencies vary depending on the medium where the conversation is taking place. There are a surplus of different ways to contact one another digitally and each of these ways has its own rules and features. For instance, I ascribe more urgency and importance to an iMessage text than an Instagram DM and thus will be more likely to respond to it quickly. This is probably because I see Instagram as less personal. More people have access to my social media than my phone number so if someone is able to text me on iMessage they’re probably important to me. Instagram is also not primarily a texting platform- DMs are optional but not required. iMessage on the other hand would be nothing at all if the texting feature was removed so something in my mind tells me replying on iMessage is more important.
Not Replying at all
The article Ghosting in Emerging Adults’ Romantic Relationships: The Digital Dissolution Disappearance Strategy defines ghosting as, “Unilaterally ceasing communication (temporarily or permanently) in an effort to withdraw access to individual(s) prompting relationship dissolution (suddenly or gradually) commonly enacted via one or multiple technological mediums.” It’s a strategy of just ignoring someone in the digital space and hoping your relationship disappears without further messiness. It’s something that wasn’t possible in the same way before the digital age when a longer reply wait time was to be expected, and it’s a term that has more emotional weight than just not replying. Being ghosted hurts, and where exactly the line is for what counts as ghosting is a matter of opinion. While the above definition is useful to understand the phenomenon at large, it lacks specificity. What one person sees as ghosting might be totally acceptable for another person. Is it ghosting to not reply on a dating app after a short text conversation or is it a term reserved only for cutting off contact after you’ve moved from the dating app to other digital mediums? Does it count as ghosting before you’ve met in person? Does using an emoji reaction count as replying or is this also ghosting?
Do you guys have any thoughts on replies and their meanings? What are your replying habits like?
Hi!
By reading your Blogpost, I began to also see how I differentiate Social Media/Collaborative Tools on my devices – when I receive a DM on Instagram I take a lot longer to reply to it because Instagram has this more laid-back approach. Additionally, as you mentioned, more people are able to reach me on Instagram so I usually prioritize my WhatsApp messages because I feel them to be more urgent and personal.
Simultaneously, I feel that I have a pre-existing framework and bias towards Social Media, which makes me pay less attention towards it. But the collaborative and social tools on Social Media are still important – receiving reels or videos from people help to brighten my mood by making me laugh, so why am I already pushing and sliding this message away just because it is on Instagram? I really like your blogpost because it has opened up the way I view these social tools, what hierarchy I have created for them, and forced me to see them in a different light.
I agree with what you are saying. I would even take it a step further and say that within the apps there is a certain urgency created. For example whatsapp. You can archive chats so you they don’t have a pop up. Many of my chats are archived which makes me ignore those messages more. The reason I have chats archived is because it makes it organised. If my chats aren’t organised, I’ll likely ignore everyone. So instead I archive most chats except for the ones that I think are important. For me that means that chats that are archived believe I am a bad texter because I rarely react but it also means I can react to the people that are important to me.
hey! i also was thinking about kind of “common understanding” that you need to answer messages immediately on the phone. or sometimes it is opposite when people on purpose don’t answer messages for a longer time in order to seem busy or something. it is quite interesting phenomenon.
it would be interesting to explore psychological impact of this. being a quick texter myself it is quite hard and honestly hurtful if people do not answer me quickly (my friends, i mean). it makes me feel like they do not really care which probably is not the case, but just the fact that i know they could answer makes me wonder. it also becomes harder to plan things like going out together. on the other side, i can understand that being a “bad texter” also might come from that pressure to answer and overwhelming amount of messages and notifications.