Messages App
Watch this iPhone Messaging apps tutorial to see how it works.
We often use the “messages” app on our smartphones without thinking too much about how technology changes the way we experience communication with people over long distances. As you watch the video or look at the messages app and other communication apps on your own smartphone, consider the following questions:
What are the benefits of the messages app?
What are the drawbacks of the messages app?
How does the messages app affect the flow of my life?
You can consider these same questions as we investigate other and older technologies of communication.
Technologies of Communication
Odds are good that nearly everything around you was made or invented by a person. We are surrounded by the products of millennia of accumulated knowledge. One specific invention has enabled us to build upon previous inventions: language. There is debate, but somewhere between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, humans started talking to one another with complex languages.
For a very, very long time humans communicated exclusively with people physically near them. Artwork was a way to leave simple messages, but if you wanted to discuss complex ideas, you had to share the same physical space as the people with whom you were communicating. Some people still live according to an oral culture, where communities are more tight-knit and intergenerational. Knowledge is held by the elders and is passed down by listening. Community wisdom is often grounded in the experiences of past generations.
You are most likely not from an oral culture, instead, you are probably from a written culture. Written cultures are a relatively recent development, beginning with the ability to print words onto paper for distribution in the 15th century. Although the alphabet was invented around 1000 BCE and paper around 100 CE, it took a while before people began reading and writing on a regular basis.
With a written alphabet, paper, books, and a system of transportation to move all of this around, complex ideas could be communicated and discussed without people sharing a physical space. It may have taken a while, but someone in England could write a letter to a relative living in another country and they could write back. Before paper and writing, you would not have been able to communicate with someone who lived far away, but you were also much less likely to know someone who lived far away. People rarely left their local communities. Faster transportation and the ability to communicate over farther distances may have led to people leaving home at higher rates. As transportation sped up with railroads in the early 19th century so too did the ability to communicate over long distances.
The electric telegraph was invented in 1838 and for the first time in history complex communication could happen faster than people could move. Wires criss-crossed the land and were laid under oceans, effectively eradicating the limits of space. Some, like Henry David Thoreau, wondered if someone from Maine would have anything important to communicate with someone in Texas. Soon after, in 1876, the telephone was invented. These long-distance, instantaneous communications never completely replaced the slower, physical letters or talking face to face, but it started to shift people’s priorities and was taxing on their time. Some, like the Amish, are hesitant to use telephones because of their ability to interrupt the people in a shared physical space. Those that do have phones keep them outside in a separate building.
Smartphones and the internet have ushered in what can be thought of as a screen culture. Now we can talk, text, video, and soon enter into a virtual reality with anyone, anywhere in the world, and at any time. What do we lose as we collapse the space of the entire world into our pockets? It is nothing short of amazing that I can video chat with a friend on the other side of the globe, but what do I give up with such an ability? Now, we can be interrupted by anyone from anywhere at any time.
To continue to investigate the technologies of communication, you can review the sources below and complete one or more of the suggested activities.
Source 1: Timeline
2022, Ryan Smits (Civics of Technology contributor)
This timeline is not comprehensive but includes major developments in communication.
Source 2: How Humans Communicate Videos
Source 2a: Communication Then and Now
2015, Studies Weekly YouTube Channel
Source 2b: How Does Morse Code Work?
2019, Concerning Reality YouTube Channel
Source 2c: How WiFi and Cell Phones Work
2018, The Explained Channel YouTube Channel
Source 3: Critical Selection on the Telegraph
1992, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology book by Neil Postman (media theorist)
“The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its legitimacy toward the mid-nineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fast as a train could travel: about thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solving particular problems. Prior to the telegraph, information tended to be of local interest. Telegraphy changed all of this, and instigated the second stage of the information revolution. The telegraph removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information, and, for the first time, transportation and communication were disengaged from each other. In the United States, the telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified nation-state. But more than this, telegraphy created the idea of context-free information—that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.” (Postman, 1992, pp. 67-68)
Source 4: The Costs of Digital Communication: A Q&A with Sherry Turkle
2016, SHRM — Kathryn Tyler
Photo by Domenico Loia
Source 5: Can You Still Send a Telegram?
2016, The Atlantic—Adrienne LaFrance
Western Union Telegram card from the 1930s
Source 6: Connected, but Alone?
2012, TED YouTube Channel
As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication -- and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.
Source 7: Texting vs Calling
2020, Psych News Daily — Douglas Heingartner
To what extent do you agree with the reasons at the end? How often do you make a phone call over texting?
Activities
-
Write a Letter
Pick someone you care about like a close friend, parent, relative, or impactful teacher and write them a letter by hand. Try to reserve at least 20 minutes of uninterrupted time to write. You might right about something that reminded you of them, your favorite shared memory, what you love and miss most about them, the first time you met them, etc.
Afterwards, reflect on how the experience was different than texting and how it felt to write them a letter. -
Switch to a Phone Call
The next time you find yourself in a lengthy text conversation suggest switching to a phone call with the person. Maybe they asked you a complex question, you are making plans, or can just tell you will send a lot of back-and-forth texts.
How did you feel switching to a phone call? What changed about the conversation once you were talking in real-time? -
Receive Messages Like Mail
Turn off all email and social media notifications for at least a week. Set a time of day that you will check for any messages you received and only check and respond to your messages at that preset time.
What is it like to not receive push notification all the time? How does it feel to only check messages at a specific part of the day? -
Ask Critical Questions
Students will critically inquire into their relationship with long-distance communication by asking the five critical questions about modern messaging with apps like “Messages:”
What do we give up for the benefits of the messages app?
Who is harmed and who benefits from a messages app?
What does a message app need?
What are the unintended or unexpected changes caused by a messages app?
Why is it difficult to imagine our world without a messages app?