Notification fugue

1: YOU'RE MY FAVOURITE NOTIFICATION

There was a time when I had a Tumblr account - it was back in 2015, when I was in a retrospectively up-to-snuff relationship with a reliance on memes, references and other moment-to-moment signs.

"You're my favourite notification" was a simple text post shared on the site, and it was one of those very memes. Customarily, we both liked, reblogged, and shared it ourselves. In doing so, we were recognising an appreciation for one another among a flurried fog of other visual cues. It was a kitschy message, but right for the times.

In the gaps between the real and the simulated, between the relationships that exist and don't exist, between online and offline, it's almost impossible to maintain an identity. If I wanted to coin another phrase, I could say that notification fog has given way to notification fugue.

They say that millennials have a problem with personal communication, but the truth is that personal communication has a problem with millennials. Now I'm going to try and explain why, with some back-pocket pop philosophy and only a pinch of cynicism.

2: ARCHAEOLOGIES AND MY AUNT'S HANDWRITING

hey sorry i didn’t get back to you, i was in a depressive hole for a few days and then felt too embarrassed about not doing it sooner that now i simply can’t engage/felt unworthy of the opportunity/drafted a reply in my head & then imagined i sent it

— molly conger (@socialistdogmom) December 17, 2020

I'm using this tweet as one example, but I'm sure there are hundreds of others. It's an emblem of the semi-apologetic prose millennials use, a voice used to illustrate how they aren't communicating with one another - or their colleagues, or their families - in ways that seem normal. I'm going to offer an archaeology of communication that I hope will illustrate why this trend is increasingly widespread. I'll be starting with the apex of communication - the letter - and track the changes from there.

Back in the back-end of the twentieth century, sending letters was a convenient means of getting a written message around. Let's not mince words: by modern standards, it was slow and ineffectual. More recently, letters were reserved for sentimental friends, TV license reminders, and the paper bank statements you forgot to turn off. 

For our purposes, a notable difference between one letter and another was whether it was hand-written, or typed (on typewriter at first, then a word processor). Often, the sender of a handwritten letter could be identified by the handwriting on the address. Because of this, the letter enjoyed an easy identification of personal messages; I know when my aunt sends me a Christmas card, because I can recognise her handwriting. This distinguished personal mail from business (or junk). The latter, rarely meriting a response, and the former, meriting thanks - or a receipt in the least. 

I want to point out a binary (an either/or characteristic) that exists for each message in a given mode of communication. Either a message is personal, or it is impersonal. A personal message is bespoke, designed for the recipient(s). An impersonal message will tend to be instrumental, essential and free of any emotional load that, owing to their bespoke nature, a personal message might carry. It is the personal messages that millennials are apparently struggling to deal with.

This personal / impersonal split exists in the context of a lot of other binaries - paid / unpaid, reply / no reply, action / no action - but it is arguably the most important. The way an individual reacts to a message is ultimately how they relate to it. 

Moreover, there are social conventions attached to a personal message that do not apply for impersonal ones. The reply, or lack thereof, can have consequences. Personal relationships can live or die on messages exchanged. An impersonal message left on read has little consequence: a personal message left on read will almost always be interpreted in some way by the sender.

So a letter is either personal or impersonal. Nowadays, it's almost entirely the latter. They're instrumental things, those bank statements and fake threats from TV Licensing (they never authorise a visit). Acknowledging or, worse, replying to these letters would feel odd. If those companies were on WhatsApp, it would feel normal to leave them on read. 

3: A PRINCELY SUM (OF UNREAD MAIL)

The next step up in written communication was the fax, but the inconvenience and ephemerality of this particular method leaves little to discuss, so I'm going to push onto its new-fangled cousin: email.

When email came on the scene, it triggered a substantial change in the nature of communication. Email could be very personal: in an age before social networking, it was possible to engage in lengthy, profound conversations thanks to bleeding Yahoo. I have friends who started dating after meeting someone off the back of extensive email communications. That's not the norm in 2020 - I'm at least in touch enough to realise that - but it was a possibility, and it remains so; a friend I haven't met in years could send me an email tomorrow and we could end up back in touch. 

Regardless, email is a diverse space not unlike the postbox. It's where you receive those bank statements you did remember to take online, where a few of your bills probably get processed, and where other administrative tasks may coincide. Crucially, email is also the original sinner when it comes to both spam and chain messages. 

Nigerian princes are at home in email. You'd think they'd be at home in Nigeria - but the anonymity, replicability and sheer scale of email make it the perfect hunting ground for scammers. In the late nineties and early noughties, receiving occasional nonsense from just beyond the Gulf of Guinea became increasingly commonplace. And then there were the chain emails: the bad luck that would befall anyone unfortunate enough not to forward some innocuous list on to ten additional friends. Social pressure was involved. Email had created the conditions for a hive of unwanted messages, generating impersonal content that could pretend to be personal. Nigerian princes had kicked that hive right over.

In sum, email had blurred the clear differential between a personal message and an impersonal one that existed in the medium of letters. Email scammers employed appeals to emotion, first-name-terms and gentle requests to thread the needle into their victims' inbox - the inbox of someone they have never met. The victim receives a message that appears personal - i.e. the scammer wishes for it to be interpreted in a personal capacity - but really, the message has no personal content. The signifier of personality is layered on top of the signifiers for scam and cheat; impersonal and instrumental in the plainest terms. So the personal / impersonal binary has been crossed like the Rubicon.

4: ALL NOTIFICATIONS ARE EQUAL...

Social media follows on the heels of email. As smartphones and social media grew more popular in tandem, the focus shifted from alerts within applications / programs (e.g. for each new text, or email) to global notifications across all applications, for a given device. Another Rubicon has been crossed here: the appearance of a notification - apart from subject line and perhaps symbol - is the same, whether personal or impersonal. Notifications were no longer simply signifiers of a message received, but of other things. Notifications could be updates, or advertising. The easy identification of the letter had fallen away, and commercial incentives had been mixed up into communication. "Communicativ capitalism", as Jodie Dean calls it, was on the up and up.

Moreover, on the "timelines" of social networks, content that users had actually, personally requested grew more interspersed with advertising. Every few posts with specific relevance to the user, there would be an advertisement. And the advertisements users saw would be catered to their interests and their activity, on the basis that this boosted engagement. Further down the line, timelines were organised further in line of this algorithmic model, increasingly reliant on the use of cookies (stored information about individual users). Previous use was taken as gospel for future use. Social media became less like looking through your letters on the doormat and more like sifting through the postman's mailbag before he has even reached your address. In a perplexing shift, email changed likewise: auto-dividing into "social" and "promotions" and offering a "focused" view on the basis of what a user was expected to find important. The primary mode was now the algorithmic one, funnelling advertisements and suggestions on top of regular use. A straightforward, unilateral view of incoming messages was secondary. 

The personal had been jumbled up in the impersonal mailbag. TV Licensing and the Christmas card from my aunt, one and the same, forever.

5: BUT SOME NOTIFICATIONS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

Regardless of an individual's buy-in to social media and its systems, the number of emails received by the average person has been growing exponentially for some time. As the flurry of notifications has grown in scale, the difficulty of differentiating between them has grown in kind. This differentiation is not just literal but psychological: If a message from a close friend seeking emotional support is received in the same space and format as a message from a mobile gaming app that needs more jelly beans matching, the former is devalued by its proximity to the latter. 

Instead of providing a level playing field for the recipient's messages, allowing each sender to sculpt what is received, modern communications focuses on providing a level playing field for senders, and then sculpting the recipient's point of view so that what a given communications provider thinks is important floats to the top. The miracle of the number of services contained within a smartphone comes with the compromise that both sender and recipient have lost the power to distinguish, to differentiate. In offering notifications that are all largely similar, modern communications is proliferate with masks.

Scammers put on masks when they pretended to approach users with a personal angle. Chain emails masked their purposes by levying peer pressure between personal relationships. Now, communications media masks almost every individual message by subsuming it within some greater system, a more efficient functionality that dissipates the binary between a personal communication and an impersonal one. At the same time, corporations have grown more and more adept at employing false conviviality in their PR, using vast social media teams to forge identities on Twitter or Facebook, and employing consultancies to write charming email communications. Individuals know that these corporations do not really have a personal touch - that much is clear from engaging with the stripped-back, overworked HR sector. Rather, these corporations just use the personal signifier to provoke a positive response. They wear the mask of the personal - and level the binary with it.

6: CLOSING THOUGHTS 

There is much more to be said on the way that the receipt of communication has changed; I'm sure the personal / impersonal binary isn't the only one that has been blurred by notification fugue. There's also the question of trends such as "inbox zero", characterised by an aim to clear out all the messages on a given account. Under this dictum, messages are seen as something we want to get rid of, at the expense of any other response. The risk of instrumentalising communication - turning it into a means to an end, as opposed to an end in itself - is precisely a consequence of failing to recognise the truth at the core of this issue. It's something that was obvious once, in an age of cumbersome and difficult communication, at risk of being forgotten in an age of the opposite:

Not all messages are of equal value to the recipient. But the masks they are forced to wear make it seem that way.

To rekindle our relationships and recognise our capacity for solidarity, it is essential that society at large unlearns the way that communications (and their providers) have structured our social lives. Under the status quo of algorithmic methods and instrumental attitudes, any given political movement stands about as much chance of creating radical change as my aunt does with a Nigerian prince.