You have spent most of your online life on IMs like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram or Discord? Sending countless meaningless chit chat, small talk, gossip talk that you forget the next week? I did and you are not alone. Group chats and IMs are uncool, being chronically online is not cool either, and finally being cool is uncool. Being offline is hip now.
When using IM there is a self imposed requirement to wait, reply, wait and reply. None of it is async that we were once promised. It might be async, but in reality it is not. It's completely sync communication just with some extra unnecesary idle times. You don't need that for your personal life communication. Just make a call.
Messaging is time consuming. But there is a silver bullet -- emails. You check your emails once or twice a day and that's ok. Nobody expects you to response in a few seconds. You can take your time and respond when you will gather resources or find an answer. It's almost fully async medium close to regular retro paper letters (which I wonder if they will make a comeback soon).
In professional environment there might be a case when you exchange emails back and forth, one after another in short interval. In such case the discussion can be very time consuming. You firstly spend time to craft your message and then wait for other side to respond. But this scenario is rare in my opinion. On the other hand it is very common have a sync conversation on IMs apps. How many times you were staring blankly at a "Hi" message from your colleague, expecting him to follow with some more info. All that you see is ellipsis "..." while waiting, wasting time on idle staring at the screen. You might be the one who comply to "no hello" policy but don't expect that others will do the same.
Writing emails has some traction to it. An author must create a thought that he wants to transmit trough an email. Composing and sending an email is harder than just writing a "Hi" message into a chat window and clicking "Enter".
Of course there is no way people will start using emails again when they have an option to quickly send a short "Hi" message on MS Teams so this entire rant is meaningless. Actually, the IMs in work environment is an upgrade. You have an option to treat them async. The problem is you. Why you react the way you do when receiving a "Hi" message? You could just ignore it and do your work. But this "Hello" message leaves an itch on back of your brain. You anticipate the followup messages, it's eating you from an inside. Finally you fold and reply with "Hi".
Email client filled with spam
What about personal life? I remember the times of SMS messaging. It was used to send short messages, e.g. confirming a meetup, sending an address or some other small information. Maybe it was used by some like internet chat with hundreds of messages a day. But for general public there were two limitations: 1) slow typing on T9 keyboards, and 2) price of single SMS. You hardly ever spend an hour discussion on something over SMS because of inconveniance. Today I can easily spend an hour discussion something unimportant on a group chat or in DMs. It's just too easy.
But to make it clear. Messaging is superior to making a call. You have complete history of what you and the other person said, it's quick to search, you can send media. It's not strange that IMs are more popular now than calls.
There are tradeoffs. You have notifications overload now. IMs tends to produce tons of notifications. It's frustrating to receive multiple notifications in span of a minute because
somebody use
to write
messages
like that.
Why on hell Android is not using any kind of throttling to limit notifications received? Do I really need to hear the same sound and vibration every 2 seconds because some person (actually I have a habit of writing this way) sends a two words message instead of building bigger paragraph and then clicking the "Send" button only after entire thought is captured by text? At least give me an option to rate limit number of notifications I get.
See the simple idea for limiting (throttling) notifications:
Dear phone, Please do not constantly bombard me with sound notifications. One per hour is sufficient. I remember that I heard you; I just do not care right now.
Why do we want to send the information as quickly as possible? The receiver probably will be happier if he gets entire thought or story at once instead of waiting. On the other hand this waiting is part of the story. Like waiting for a final episode of TV show you're watching. It's different if there's no waiting. Without anticipation the story is not the same. It's like reading 200+ messages of group chat next day. It's not the same as you weren't there. Also if you write a long paragraph for 4 minutes you might lose the person on the other side. That's why you might "write" "messages" "this way" and split it into smaller chunks.
Emails do not work that way. You will write entire message and receiver will get it as a whole. Everyone is on the same ground. There will be no stream of consciousness, no anticipation, no staring at the "..." symbol, no fear of loosing your audience. You send a message and close the email client.
