(Including Most of the Ones You Send)
Apple announced recently that it is working on a new feature that will allow users to stop receiving texts from unknown numbers. The announcement was very popular with users, and not so popular with political fundraisers, for obvious reasons. There is a clear conflict here between the privacy interests of people who don’t want to be bothered on their phones, and the pecuniary interests of people who make a living bothering people on their phones. Senior citizens who are vulnerable to fraudulent text messages also have reason to cheer the new feature, as it may stop some fraudsters whom Dante failed to discourage.
But the problem with texting goes deeper than the unwanted interruptions; the texts we want to receive are arguably an even bigger problem because of the way they affect our attention. As much as I look forward to Apple’s new feature, I would also like to urge a re-examination of the place text messaging occupies in our communications environment. Because it seems to me that the vast majority of texts on our phones—those we send as well as those we receive—are fraudulent. Let me explain.
Ancient wisdom about modern communications
The stereotype about old people and technology is that we can’t even use our TVs and microwaves without help from our kids and grandkids. The stereotype notwithstanding, I think today’s users could learn something from old people about text messaging, because those of us who watched telecom technologies evolve over the last fifty years just might have a better understanding of the how text messaging fits in with the other available means of communication.
Well, I’m an old person. I was practicing law before email was invented and when the internet was mostly a toy; and I was a lawyer at the FCC when the first digital mobile phones were licensed. So allow me to tell the story.
Once upon a time, way back in the 1980s, there were two ways to communicate with absent people: letters and phone calls. They each had their advantages. Letters were clearly the better way to communicate long or involved messages, both because they allowed the sender to think and write clearly and because they allowed the recipient to read and reread with as much concentration as necessary.
Letters also had a durability that made them the choice for most matters of importance. The words on the page persisted for years and resisted mischaracterization in the event of later disagreement. This durability gave letters evidentiary value that no oral conversation could match. If you really needed to communicate something, and you needed to be able to prove you communicated it, you sent a letter. And before you did so, you thought about it pretty carefully because you knew you couldn’t change it once it was in the mailbox.
But letters took a day or two to arrive, even in the 1980s, whereas phone calls allowed for the instantaneous transfer of information. That made letters very clumsy for anything that required the give and take that usually takes place face-to-face. People could negotiate by letter, but for that purpose it was inferior in almost every way to the phone because the phone allowed for the real-time feedback that allows all parties to clarify both questions and answers. True, there were evidentiary problems, and people sometimes reneged on promises they made on phone calls, or they denied saying things their interlocutor claimed to have heard. But with good faith on all sides, phone calls were clearly superior for a wide range of personal and business communications, whereas letters were the preferred medium for threats, warnings, and other communications known colloquially as “nastygrams.”
Synchronous versus asynchronous
We can formalize this distinction a bit by noting that the phone is designed to facilitate synchronous communication—both parties communicating at the same time—while the letter is an example of asynchronous communication. When I send a letter, I don’t bother to think whether the person I’m addressing is available at that moment, because the letter is intended for him or her to open at a later time.
Email, which became mainstream in the 1990s, narrowed the gap between synchronous and asynchronous communication because email is essentially a faster kind of letter. Email allows for instantaneous delivery of long messages, and has just as much evidentiary value as letters. But email, though instantaneous, is not synchronous. In other words, emails are delivered instantaneously to the recipient’s inbox whether or not the recipient is paying any attention to email at that moment—and the sender knows (or used to know) that this is true; after all, if the sender really wants a real-time communication with the recipient, he could use the phone! So choosing email necessarily means that the sender does not care whether the recipient is there or not.
Despite the dramatic reduction in delivery time, the asynchronous nature of email remained obvious to people as long as email correspondence took place on desktop or even laptop computers. People in the 1990s didn’t (yet) spend all day on their computers, and especially where personal communications were concerned they might only make time for reading and answering emails once or twice a day, perhaps in the early morning or the late evening.
The deceptiveness of text messaging
Perhaps you see where this is going. Even before email could make the jump to smartphones, some diabolical intelligence invented the text message. Actually, text messaging (or “SMS messaging,” where “SMS” stands for “Short Message Service”) was itself an evolution from earlier devices called “pagers.” These were, as their name suggests, designed to “page” people over wide areas by sending them a phone number to call. Not too many people needed this; the main users were doctors, emergency personnel, sales personnel in the field, and eventually drug dealers. But once SMS messaging was incorporated into the phones everyone started carrying, its use became more widespread because it didn’t require a separate device. And once smartphone keyboards made it feasible to type long messages via “short message service,” the floodgates were open.
Like emails, text messages are instantaneous but still asynchronous! That is, a person who sends you a text message sends it without bothering to ascertain whether you are in a position to reply or not. But unlike emails, text messages pop up on our phones—the devices we use for synchronous communication, and the devices most of us have with us at all times! And the consequences of this innovation have been devastating.
For one thing, it can no longer be said that asynchronous communications are generally more thoughtful than phone calls or face-to-face interactions. From the start, people who would use punctuation and capitalization in letters and even in emails would neglect to do so in text messages. The justification was that we were all typing with our thumbs, and before smartphones it might take three or four taps to get a single letter typed. (If you don’t know why, ask your parents. If they don’t know either, ask your grandparents and then get off my lawn!) There was a dominant ethos of sloppiness that hung over the whole medium, and in time this sloppiness inevitably diminished the amount of thought people put into their messages before sending them.
But the other consequence is particularly damaging for our students today: Because they are delivered instantaneously to the same devices we use for synchronous communication, text messages are increasingly seen by senders and recipients alike as urgent. This is nearly always false, but somehow this fact doesn’t register. Students are frequently distracted from their studies not by the impulse to send a text but by the impulse to respond to any text that might have been sent.
Text messages, then, are emails masquerading as phone calls, and pretending they’re entitled to an instantaneous response.
The truth will set you free
The truth, though, is that no one who sends you a text message is entitled to an instantaneous response, because whoever it is sent you a one-way message without having any idea whether you were looking at your phone or not. Checking your phone every few minutes to see if a text has come in is like staying home all day so you’ll be there if someone knocks. We may do that sometimes, like when we’re expecting a delivery or a visit from the plumber, but it’s no way to go through life on a daily basis. Neither should we go through life checking our phones for texts. If someone needs to reach us quickly, they can choose a synchronous technology. They can use the phone app on our phones.
Is this that big a deal? Yes. A few years back, Rich Moss did a couple of superb HeightsCast episodes (here and here) with Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016). I was still practicing law back then, struggling every day to climb from beneath a digital avalanche that seemed to require far too much of my time and attention. Newport’s focus on attention management was a game-changer for me, and I scheduled a luncheon meeting at my firm so I could share Newport’s insights with my younger colleagues. When I told them that there should be a time each night after which they simply stop checking in with the office, they expressed deep skepticism. That is, they were uncomfortable with the idea that there was a time of the day beyond which it would be reasonable not even to check for an email or a text-message from a client or colleague. They couldn’t stop wondering: What if something important happens after hours? What if someone sends them an important message and they miss it? “Your phone,” I answered. “If someone really needs you, they’ll make your phone ring.”
Our teenage students now are where the harried young lawyers and legal assistants were ten years ago (and that alone should give us pause). We all need to think before we text, and ask ourselves: Am I looking for a reply to this message anytime soon? If the answer is yes, choose synchronous communication—a phone call with a real person. Or as AT&T told us back when we knew it as “Ma Bell”: Reach out and touch someone.
Never text anything to which you would like a response sooner than tomorrow.