Photo by Brunno Tozzo on Unsplash
I’m a good texter. I might even say I’m a fantastic texter: I will write you back. My enthusiasm for responding is of course, bounded by the proximity of our relationship, but I still feel obliged to answer all but smishing scams and promotions from Bed Bath and Beyond. If you text me, I will respond pretty much immediately, because I always have my phone on me, like its been surgically attached to my hand. If I don’t respond quickly, I certainly will within several hours, at most 24, and typically this is because I’m sleeping or I need to deliberate; you have asked me for something and I don’t know the answer. It could be that I’m too responsive, too available, but so I am.
This is not the case for many of my friends, however. In fact, some of my closest friends in the world routinely answer my texts with delay of undue, even ridiculous, duration. It always seemed to me that quick action occupies less mental space than filing a message away for three weeks, its burden constantly weighing on you in anticipation of crafting some dialogic response. I also will just forget.
Sometimes these friends even ghost me altogether. But I still consider them close friends! That interests me. Because, if this happened in person, it would be quite rude. If it happened a few times, I’d probably get the impression they were going Colm Sonny Larry on me.
The fact is, astonishingly, that (outside of work, probably, if your work is “email,” like mine) ignoring communications from anyone, even friends, is acceptable now. Not that I ever lived in a social atmosphere in which other norms prevailed: my adult sociality rose simultaneously with SMS, BBM, and iMessage. I think this development is bad.
All text exchanges end, eventually, but this is typically after at least one message from each party has been sent and received. You submit a job application online, they respond with We regret to inform you that we have made the decision not to move forward…” and that’s that. You ask your friend to meet you for dinner, they say yes, where and what time, and you negotiate, and that’s that. You tell your wife you’ll be home in 15 and she says “ok” and that’s that. Sometimes with work emails I fully assume I’ve had the last word and I get another response that says “thank you!!!” and then I don’t know what to think. But at least we had a little back and forth, some give and take.
But, even while it hurts me on the margin when people don’t respond, I understand why the desire is there. That we are all always available to everyone we’ve ever had the misfortune of giving our phone number or email to (or has the will and means to purchase it from data dealers) is a daunting and intimidating fact. We are always silently staring into the great empty void that hangs constantly over us, ready to be assaulted without notice by, yes, friends old and new, but more disgustingly by the atrociously persistent marketing bots, email list servs, advertisers, and attention farmers. It’s a horrid landscape! They want our money and attention and they don’t care how they get it. But, like I said, it’s still painful and sad when we don’t get a response from people who presumably want (or need) to talk to us.
Severe delays in response, like my old friend’s texts are government-run trains, are a reaction to a splitting of the mind that comes from constant availability. Even if we aren’t responding to anyone, or aren’t actively engaged in some kind of written communication, the very availability of our person is an invisible burden. When our minds are fractured, we rob ourselves of the intrinsic pleasure and productive capacities of focus, that rare and beautiful state. Ignoring people can be a way of rejecting this burden of availability. No, my time is actually mine, I’ll talk to who I want to when I want to. Fair enough. I agree.
Another unfortunate side effect of this availability is that of expectation. We all now expect to be able to reach anyone instantaneously; we can simply insert ourselves into their inbox at will. We can vibrate on their hip or in their purse whenever we want. And we can’t see what else they are doing. Though we know in abstract they are at work, eating dinner, walking the dog, driving their car, from our perspective they are simply a name in our contact list. This is, of course, an unrealistic frame for healthy communication. It’s not reasonable to expect an immediate response, or perhaps even a response at all. But I know these people have their phones on them! They’re using it all day long. Everyone is.
“Interface” means precisely that my relationship to the other is never face-to-face, that is always mediated by digital machinery. I stumble around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the whole of it remains forever beyond my comprehension.
- Slavoj Zizek
This expectation further develops from my own availability, both in myself and in my recipients. It seems nice to be the person who responds right away, but once you become “the reliable communicator,” it actually creates more pinging notifications rather than fewer. Earning a spot as the go to guy might make me feel conscientious and effective, but it also widens the ceaseless river of written text flowing into my already overstuffed consciousness.
So everyone knows that we are all available all the time, but everyone also knows that when we send a text or email we might get nothing in return. Against the background of the expectation of availability, there then exists simultaneously no expectation of a response at all. This creates a strange atmosphere which is more damaging than the sum of its parts: we are always able to reach out, but we never know if we’re actually able to connect. Like Michael Roberson writes, “The Ghost crawled its way into the digital-cultural Zeitgeist.”
Haunting - Odilon Redon
There’s some internet discussion about sending work emails late at night. One side argues that it’s invasive to send a late night email, that they disturb the peace of the recipient, and that these should be scheduled for normal work hours. The other rightly points out that text-based communication is inherently asynchronous, the recipient should just wait until the morning or the workday or whatever to respond. What’s the big deal?
Both sides are, of course, correct. It’s impossible to escape the reach of the text, unless you put your phone in the garbage disposal or hike to a remote location. And it’s also fine to respond when you get the chance. You should respond eventually, though. The crux of the late-night work email debate is the deeply held desire to be able to just shut off one of the infinite channels created by text, email, and availability for a few moments of fleeting rest each day. This fragile state of precarious peace is easily shattered by an incoming notification.
Even when we’re ghosting each other, even when we set aside time for focus or deep work, we still know that we are available. We have to be ready to code switch between different selves at a moments notice: our work self, our self with our new friend group, our self with our siblings, and so on. We’re never able to effectively file these away and shut them down, so we’re always running multiple operating systems at the same time. The “relationship of the real bodily person to my screen persona,'“ as Zizek calls it, is constantly assaulted by latent demands from infinite directions. These conflicting selves demand our attention even when they’re not engaged: this is what I mean by a fractured mind. It’s intensely distressing. I just don’t think ghosting solves this problem. It makes it worse.
Sometimes I wish I lived in an era where writing letters still predominated. If I sent someone a letter and their reply arrived a month later, I’d probably be thrilled. The fact that I expect a prompt response to my text is perhaps more damaging than the ambiguous availability of my correspondent. Reaching people is cheaper than ever; the single, unpunctuated line of “lol” was always going to be less rich and rewarding than a multipage, handwritten letter of baroque effusion. That doesn’t mean we should consider it worthless entirely.
Great piece. Was just having a similar thought to your final point. There are entire books (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/103720) composed of just letters between two people. I might be nostalgic, but I miss writing long, rambling letters to friends and family. Now it's just the expected 👍 before the Ghost-clock reaches zero.