Attention is rare.
Decisions are hard.
Searching takes effort.
For thirty years, texting has been a powerful medium. It is what vibrates in our pocket. It promises something urgent, and an answer that is just as urgently needed.
“I’m ten minutes late,” is a nice text, and “okay” is a great response.
Like all working digital media, it is sticky and has a strong network effect. Once someone sends you a message, you have to send them back. As soon as your colleagues are texting, you need to text back. It works best when you do it the way others do it.
And, like all digital media that works, it breaks. Sometimes from bad spammers who send messages pretending to know you, “do you want to play golf tomorrow?” or “your wife said you’re selling your house…”. And sometimes from people who aren’t bad at all, but just have a different sense of the medium than you.
And so here is a text in which 15 people are declared. You don’t know most of them, so all you see are their phone numbers. And it requires you to stop what you’re doing and open your calendar and figure out if that day is free or not. And whether the people you hope to interact with will go or not. And of course, if someone hits the answer, everyone gets the answer. And of course, one of those people then decides to “get the word out” and tell everyone else in the thread about their unrelated garage sale coming up in just a few days…
Pretty soon, your pocket vibrates with both kinds of texts often enough that you simply don’t prioritize checking, and then the next time an urgent text comes up, it’s ignored.
Texting comes first next. There is no nuance to it, no priority list, nothing but “I read it” or “I didn’t read it.”
The asymmetry of dynamics here sows the seeds of doom. It is up to each person you know to protect your attention, each of them to be generous and discreet and not to waste your time. And the cost of just doing what everyone else is doing is so low that the whole thing starts to degrade.
Add to that the ease with which telemarketers and spammers can now weaponize your initial contact (14 notes for one dinner reservation!) and you can see how the drive only goes one way.
The magic of widespread media like phone, email, and messaging is that it’s an open API. No one is really in charge of the inputs, but that’s also the problem.
I hope that services like texts.com or even the folks in Cupertino will take a deep breath and create a protected layer for useful interactions that are actually licensed. The structure of the interface determines the utility of the system. If it’s easy to hook 15 strangers, people will do it.
In 1994, I led a team that invented games you could play with text. It almost turned into a killer idea and maybe it will come back one day.
And in 1999, I tried to coordinate the work around buying cheap email stamps so that the API could be slowed down and focused a bit.
Maybe the AI will start to be an (imperfect) filter, but the problem is so hard to solve in retrospect, I’m not optimistic.
The rule is quite simple: bad noise crowding out good signal in almost any useful means of communication. The opportunity is to design against the bad noise and be vigilant about preserving the magic that made it useful in the first place.
