Joe Pinsker writes:

At first, being reachable all the time felt good. To professionals who started using BlackBerries 20 years ago to conduct business on the go, it registered as a superpower. “They felt like masters of the universe,” Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics professor at UC Irvine who studied the devices’ uptake in the early 2000s, told me. But as more people got mobile devices, responding to messages anytime became the norm among co-workers as well as friends and loved ones. The superpower morphed into an obligation.

This is an evolution that Mazmanian refers to as the “spiral of expectations.” When communication technology makes a new thing (like responding on the go) possible, doing that thing can be a way for people to signal how dedicated they are as workers or family members—and, crucially, not doing that thing can suggest that they aren’t dedicated enough. Now when people feel they haven’t responded sufficiently quickly, they think they owe their correspondent an apology.

This dynamic is not unique to the internet and instant communication. Nineteenth-century letter-writers were constantly apologizing for and explaining their delays when they felt that a socially unacceptable amount of time had passed, according to Jason Farman, a media scholar at the University of Maryland. As an example, he pointed me to a line in an 1863 letter from an Illinois man to his cousin: “I feel it my duty to write to you and I also feel that it is a duty which I have neglected quite long enough, yet I hope I will be forgiven when I explain the matter to you.”

But what’s changed in the past 10 to 20 years, with the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller. Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning. [Continue reading…]