Poor attention span.
Decisions are difficult.
Searching takes effort.
For 30 years, texting has been a powerful medium. It’s what vibrates in our pockets. It promises something urgent and an equally urgently required response.
“I’m 10 minutes late” is a good text and “Okay” is a great response.
Like all digital media that works, it’s sticky and has powerful network effects. If someone sends you a text message, you need to reply it. If your co-worker sends a text message, you should also send a text message. It’s more effective if you do it the way others are doing it.
And like all functional digital media, it breaks down. Sometimes it’s sent by an evil spammer who pretends to know you and sends you a text saying, “Would you like to play golf tomorrow?” or “My wife said she was selling the house…” Sometimes it’s also caused by someone who isn’t evil at all, but simply has a different feel for the medium than you do.
So, here are the sentences that were CC’d by 15 people. Since most of them don’t know, all they see is their phone number. Then you have to stop what you’re doing, open your calendar and calculate whether that day is free or not. And whether the people you want to interact with will go. And of course, when someone hits reply, everyone gets a reply. And of course, one of them decides to “spread the word” about an unrelated garage sale that will be held in just a few days and tells everyone else on the thread.
Soon, both types of texts will vibrate your pocket so often that you won’t be able to prioritize checking, and the next time an urgent text comes along, it will be ignored.
Text messages are first come, first served. It has no nuance, no priority list, just “read” or “not read.”
The asymmetry of dynamics here sows the seeds of demise. Keeping your attention depends on everyone you know, and on each of them being generous and careful and not wasting your time. And the whole thing starts to deteriorate because the cost of just doing what everyone else is doing is so low.
Add to that the ease with which telemarketers and spammers can weaponize your first contact (14 notes per dinner reservation!), and you realize how the path only goes one way. Masu.
The appeal of popular media like phone calls, email, and text messages is that they are open APIs. No one is actually responsible for the input, which is also a problem.
I hope services like texts.com and the folks at Cupertino take a deep breath and create a layer of protection for useful interactions that actually have permission. The structure of the interface determines the usefulness of the system. If it were easy to CC 15 strangers, people would do it.
In 1994, I led a team that invented a game that could be played with text. It almost became a killer idea, and perhaps it will come back someday.
Then, in 1999, I tried to adjust my efforts by buying cheap stamps for email so I could slow down the API a little and focus.
Perhaps AI will start acting as an (imperfect) filter, but I’m not optimistic because this problem is very difficult to solve after the fact.
The rules are very simple: Bad noise drowns out good signals In almost any convenient communication medium. The chance is to design against bad noise and pay attention to preserving the magic that made it useful in the first place.