The Art of Airing
Before I get off to the wrong start, I won’t be blogging about how best to air your laundry, or even how to most effectively broadcast a message. No, I will in fact broach the topic of ignoring a message.
Almost every messaging service offers a ‘read’ feature, enabling the user to see when the recipient has opened their message. WhatsApp is perhaps the most infamous service of all- giving a whole new semantic meaning to blue ticks.
Yet only a mere few of these services offer the freedom to switch off this feature. The inescapable nagging feeling of being ignored is cemented in reality with one quick glance at the conversation. Blue ticks glare back… and you glare back in annoyance. And it really begs the question: are there things we are better off not knowing? The encouragement of monitoring other peoples’ online movements is, in reality, quite unhealthy.
Because, well, let’s be honest, there’s a whole host of activities that could cause you to read a message and not immediately be able to type a response back. In a face-to-face situation, you might gesture ‘one second’, but without the capability to do so through a phone, a virtual pause is put into play instead.
But it’s when this virtual pause becomes a virtual age, and then the approach to being ignored isn’t so rational.

















