What bothers me is, we seem to have lost the middle ground.
I don’t have an option to contact others in a method that’s not urgent but in which I can reasonably expect a reply. It’s either NOW or NEVER.
Part of that is social: many people are feeling constantly overwhelmed, and the first thing they do to quell their anxiety is shove all the pending messages off their metaphorical desk. For others, if it’s not jumping up and down and waving red flags, it might as well not exist. Either way, a message that has been waiting will not get a reply.
But our technology simply doesn’t help. Tumblr is notorious for this: you have to consciously choose to check your inbox and messages, it won’t tell you that those messages have been waiting, or at least not reliably. In other media, the older messages will simply be flooded with newer ones, and the oldest - rather than getting attention first - get ignored until one digs out from under whatever backlog, if that ever happens at all. And some mediums, they actively punish you for this, automatically removing messages or notes that are more than a few days or weeks old, or rendering them inaccessible.
I think, too, that the fragmentation of our media - balkanization, really - is in part to blame. Time was, you had your email account. Multiple accounts, perhaps: work, school, personal. You might have a BBS or forum you logged in to at your pleasure. But then we got instant messaging: ICQ, AIM, and others. We got Livejournal and MySpace and Facebook.
Of course it feels overwhelming. We each have dozens of social media feeds to manage, and it’s nigh-impossible to limit them. I’m not on Twitter and Facebook, and I’m perennially Left Out because of that. If I lost Tumblr and TikTok, where would I be? But we don’t really have any tools to make this manageable, because TPTB want us overwhelmed and unable to control the firehose of data and advertising they choose to point at us. Our choices are either too much, or nothing.
We don’t want this. This isn’t the future we chose; it’s the future chosen for us.