Texting Means Never Having to Say Goodbye
Jane C. Hu (via Hacker News):
I thought about the last time I’d actually typed ttfn. I imagine it was at least 18 years ago, on my family’s Gateway desktop during the era of dial-up AOL. And then I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I said “g2g,” or even “bye,” in an online conversation. I asked some friends in a group chat if they ever say goodbye when chatting digitally. “They never really have a beginning. Do they also not have an end?” said my friend Dan. Another friend, Mitch, chimed in with a diagnosis: “It’s because we never go offline anymore.”
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In a 2016 study, many respondents say they read into a lack of response. It’s especially confusing when your conversational medium tells you if someone is currently online, or has already read your messages, like the “read” labels in iMessage, the green dot by your name in Slack, or the blue tick mark on WhatsApp messages. “When WhatsApp introduced the blue tick [that shows when you’re online], that introduced a lot of anxiety,” she says.
