Read receipts should foster better communication skills

If there’s anything with the potential to snuff friendships and start wars, it’s the “seen” timestamp on Facebook messenger.

Once, after accidentally opening a friend’s Facebook chat , I was bombarded with messages less than an hour later that read: “I know you’ve seen this.” “Hello?” “I know you’re online.” Aside from the fact that this was clearly a miscommunication, I was frustrated that my friend demanded I was available at all times and equipped to respond to her.

Almost every instant messaging app has read receipts, from iMessage to Kik to Snapchat. There’s even a Gmail app called Streak that allows senders to track email views.

When it comes to work accountability, read receipts are a practical feature. When it comes to personal communication, they are an additional layer of confusing social nuance.

The assumption is that once a person sees the message, they’re expected to respond immediately. If they don’t respond, they’re ignoring you.

The read receipt function can now be disabled with browser extensions, such as Facebook Unseen, and if you’re like me, disabling the function might save you hours of stomach-turning anxiety. But remember this — we’re humans, not machines.

Instead of ruminating on what a message that has gone five minutes without being answered must mean, why not embrace read receipts as a humbling reminder that communication doesn’t need to be instantaneous?

Because of our tech-driven society — where knowledge is glued to our fingertips — we expect everything to be as immediate. This itself isn’t necessarily bad. But on social media, we tend to forget that people are not as accessible as databases, nor should they be.

We forget that instant messaging is fairly new in the grand scheme of things, even if this form of communication has rapidly taken over. Facebook’s first mobile app was released in 2008 and included a chat feature that was built into its own app in 2011. Before instant messages and email were the norm, written letters were the primary communication method. According to an article by the Associated Press, up to 1987, the typical home received handwritten letters twice a week.

While instant messages demand stream-of-consciousness engagement and hastily constructed responses, letter writing gives you space and time to digest.

But social media brings us closer together and allows us to connect with people across the world in real time. At times, that intimacy can be incessant.

Tech-savvy millennials are major multitaskers. I always have 10 apps open at once on my iPhone which I switch between, trying to balance all of them through my single device, and research suggests I’m not the only one.

According to a study by Innerscope Research, a Boston-based neuroscience firm, participants raised around new technology switched media venues at an average of 27 switches per hour , compared to those introduced to technology later in life who switched only 17 times per hour. Unending feeds of six-second vines and 140-word tweets feed into the millennials’ tendency to constantly process information, causing our need for fast responses when we’re texting or instant messaging

There are a variety of reasons why your friend has seen but not yet responded to your non-urgent message. Maybe they fell asleep. Maybe their phone just died. Maybe they got distracted, then forgot.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt is important, but it’s a habit born mostly out of a need for self-assurance rather than acceptance. It’s equally important to accept the reasons you’re less inclined to want to hear — maybe they don’t have an excuse. Maybe they didn’t feel like it. And that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to not respond to someone. Yet, it seems like one of the worst reasons to consider, which is why read receipts can create a proverbial elephant in the chat room.

Social interaction takes time and energy in any medium, and it’s bizarre to expect a fully engaged response at all times of day. I’m not saying you should blow people off, but when you read things, don’t feel guilty about taking a few hours to think about your response.

The urgency that surrounds read receipts is another arbitrary social convention dictating how we should or should not communicate. As long as you’re being mindful of the person you’re communicating with, throw these rules out the window.

Triple text. Send paragraphs. If you want a prompt response, ask for one. Be honest when you cancel your plans — “I don’t want to get out of bed right now” is a fine reason, and a good friend will understand.

If anything, read receipts should remind us to be more honest and transparent in the way we communicate with one another.

So, next time you’re texting or IMing someone ballsy enough to keep their read receipts on, have no fear. Take a deep breath, stay patient, and wait for, “haha, sorry, fell asleep,” to come to your rescue.

Write to Isabelle at ito3@pitt.edu.