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The article, “Fidget Spinners: How Buffer Icons Have Shaped Our Sense Of Time“, gave me a perspective that I knew was true but I didn’t think about. I think it’s funny to think that these eclipses and these symbols for loading times prove to be important to us — that the time that it takes for things to buffer or load give us meaning.
Which, anecdotally, I think is accurate. We text people a paragraph long message and expect a message that took them a long time to think about. The time it takes for them to interpret the message and respond offers us an inkling of how much the person took to respond and whether or not they cared about how they formatted their response. I wonder if Apple built this with the same intention as Facebook’s pause in security profiles.
I do believe that the eclipses serve as a way to quell our anxiety over the person we are communicating with. The added feature of read receipts, an indicator of when the message was read by the receiving person, gives us exact timing of our wait. The article emphasizes that this wait gives meaning to our relationship and our message. It gives way for people to understand their place in your life. If a person chooses to read the message but refuses to reply until hours later, then both you and the person you’re communicating with gets to decide what that means. Did they not respond due to obligations? Or did they needed time to respond? Or did they just chose to ignore it completely?
Posted from Digital 101 by Christy