idontmessage

I blame Zoom. It has nothing to do with it, but I hate it, and I’m going to lean into that for a flimsy justification for blame. That is, after all, how prejudice works: justifications as sturdy as lace with about as much accuracy as an automobile in ancient Rome (or as accurate as a chariot running down an ancient Roman street for that matter, since they fell out of military use by Homer’s time).

As we Luddites are wont to do, I’ll go ahead and conflate one blasted, befuddling bit of cyberspace with another. So I’ll blame the Zoom for the iMessage. The actual chronology of their popularities is not important.

An iMessage, if you are blissfully unaware, is a text message on an iPhone which functions mostly like a regular message, but it uses wifi to send and receive texts. Also it allows you to “react” to the other person’s messages, which is really crucial, since no form of human conversation has ever allowed for a response to a statement before. Next you’ll be able to actually say something in response. Or maybe they’ll even invent a way to send little pictures that can stand in for the expression you had while reading a text so that the other person can know what your face looked like in the moment. Little emotion icons, if you will. Or maybe — just maybe — one day you can just capture the face you were making and send the picture to the other person so they’ll know what you look like in real time, IRL.

Thank goodness in the meantime I can “heart” an iMessage. I would have had no way of informing you that I, too, think your description of an illness sounds like a bummer. Language just isn’t that sophisticated yet.

When did we decide regular messages weren’t good enough? Just 15 years ago texts were all the rage. We were still holding texting competitions at the county fair, typing on wee keyboards (if you were fancy), and trying to keep our messages short enough so that the recipient didn’t get five “dings” in a row for just one response. Any photos sent were awful and heck, most of us had to put in our emotions manually.

Back in my day, we had to take off our gloves to text T9-style in our jacket pocket in the snow! There was no Siri to “send a message.” And we were grateful!

Don’t get me started on Zoom supplanting Skype either …

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Elena Johnson can be reached at ejohnson@cdapress.com.