Why I hate the phone and SMS and think every communication medium should be like Twitter

(Is that an overly descriptive title?)

Once there was this old vietnamese guy at a place where we pretended to fight with wooden swords who tried to teach us how to properly mediate ⁽¹⁾. One of the golden rules was to try and be free from interruptions. Not totally free, don’t wear earplugs or noise-canceling headphones playing ambient hippy music, but free enough so you can actually engage in what you’re trying to do and, for that old vietnamese gentleman, that meant turning off cellphones.

He said that, yes, it was natural to be afraid to turn off our cellphones, to be scared for the possibility that someone, somewhere, might have an accident and need our help at that time.

So maybe you don’t meditate when you’re waiting for your kid to come home from school, or when your girlfriend went hiking. You do it at a time when you can be, to a certain degree, relaxed that a life-or-death emergency is a very unlikely scenario to occur.

He also explained what having a cellphone with us, at all times, really meant: It meant that you’re giving anyone (and that means anyone) who has your number, the ability to call you and speak directly to your ear everyday, at every time. It’s like bestowing to all of your contacts the voice of god, that comes from the heavens to address you.

Look at your contacts. Do you want to give that power to everybody in there?

Sure, you don’t need to pick it up. But they still have the power to interrupt you, at all times and at all places. This system seems terrible wrong to me.

And then there’s SMS. It’s less obtrusive, sure. But do you know what bugs me with SMS? Most (all?) of those who use it expect an immediate response. That’s because they know that you can’t miss it if you look at your phone at all. It dominates the screen on every cellphone out there. That’s like getting email and having it fill the computer screen when you get it.

And they also know that you’ve received the SMS because they get a fancy report saying that you did. Isn’t that nice?

And that takes me to email. Email is nice, email is cool. Most people who send it don’t usually wait for a response in minutes.

Unless you work.

When you work, and especially at a company, you are expected to respond to your email. Not all of them, but the really important ones. The problem is that you don’t know which are the important ones until you check, which you must do quite regularly so you won’t get in trouble. ⁽²⁾

So, that leads me to Twitter.

Why do I love Twitter? Because it doesn’t have any expectations attached. You tweet stuff that you want to share but you don’t really expect a reply. If you want to directly communicate with someone you can add an @ or a DM to the tweet but even then you don’t get mad if you don’t get a response minutes later because you don’t expect the other person to be on twitter 24/7, checking and responding to messages. You can be confident that you’ll probably get a response from a friend if you DM them fairly soon, but you don’t fret over it, nor do you send more DMs urging them to answer.

It’s a polite way to communicate. It’s a respectful one as well, one that is considerate for the other persons time and attention.

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P.S.: The other day I got a phone call from an automatic machine asking me to dial from 1 to 9 my level of satisfaction from the phone support I got from that same company the day before. I wish I had a phone call to ask me for my level of satisfaction for that call, but there’s no digit for “blinding rage”.

1. Yes, I know how that sounds. And apparently conspicuous amounts of sitting is involved. ↩

2. Go check out Merlin Mann’s stuff about this subject.  ↩