[Article] How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails

https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...r-in-the-age-of-instant-communication/550325/

Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University who studies language and technology, puts it, “We’ve dissed people in lots of formats before.”

A Pew survey found that 90 percent of cellphone owners “frequently” carry their phone with them, and 76 percent say they turn their phone off “rarely” or “never.” In one small 2015 study, young adults checked their phones an average of 85 times a day. Combine that with the increasing social acceptability of using your smartphone when you’re with other people, and it’s reasonable to expect that it probably doesn’t take that long for a recipient to see any given message.

“You create for people an environment where they feel as though they could be responded to instantaneously, and then people don’t do that. And that just has anxiety all over it,” says Sherry Turkle, the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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These are simple little exchanges (or lack of exchanges) but it reminds me of this one point that just because people are constantly connected it doesn't mean there's anything meaningful going on, it just means you're connected. Maybe people get too much stuff and a lot of it doesn't mean anything to them. And meaning requires context:

When someone’s in front of you, “you do get to see the shadow of your words across someone else’s face,” Turkle says.

In last month’s viral New Yorker short story “Cat Person,” a young woman embarks on a failed romantic relationship with a man she meets at the movie theater where she works. They only go on one date in the story; they get to know each other primarily over text. When the affair ends messily, it reveals not only how the bubble of romantic expectations can be popped by reality’s needle, but also how weak digital communication is as a scaffolding on which to build an understanding of another person.

In an interview, the story’s author, Kristen Roupenian, said the piece was inspired by “the strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks, whether online or off.” Indeed, even for the people we already know, we increasingly rely on contextless forms of communication.
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I think even when you know someone you forget about context, because in that moment it's just a text from them and you may or may not be in the mood for it. This is also why I think the way people use text messaging systems for AP can be really misguided, people may connect via NoFap originally, and it just becomes this contextless meandering chat.