Picture this: it’s 2008, you’re wearing a pair of wet-look leggings and an Abercrombie & Fitch tank top cinched at the waist with a statement leather belt worthy of Russell Crowe in Gladiator. You brush your side fringe out of your eyes when you hear a familiar “ping” from your iPhone. Someone has texted you. For a moment you marvel at the sleek handset — 12 months ago the thought of a touch-screen mobile seemed like the stuff of science fiction. Simpler times, you think, as you tap out a quick “soz bbz il b l8 ly xxxx”.
Fast-forward to 2023, you’re on your 14th iPhone. You have 67 unread WhatsApp messages, 3,890 unread emails, nine Instagram DMs, and a happy birthday message on Facebook Messenger from your old maths teacher (weird). While there seems to be no end to the Sisyphean carousel of messaging platforms, texting — the patriarch of them all — seems as outdated as a pair of pleather leggings. Or is it?
You may not have noticed the shift at first, perhaps one of your friends silently but pointedly removed themselves from the “lisbon ladiez” chat, changed their profile picture to a pixelated cat and stopped replying to you on WhatsApp altogether. For me it started with my sister. About ten months ago, our always slightly one-sided WhatsApp conversation morphed into an increasingly belligerent monologue (from my side, naturally). Confronted about this, she claimed she had stopped using WhatsApp many months before. “When you go on WhatsApp it’s so invasive — even if you turn off read receipts it still says when you’re online. What if I simply don’t want to speak to somebody?”
Soon afterwards I began noticing friends of mine extolling the virtues of iMessage, ie old-school texting, with strings of my WhatsApp witticisms going unread. I decided to dig deeper, posing the question on Instagram, “Does anyone still use iMessage?” Almost immediately I was inundated by a flurry of responses. Not only did a lot of people use iMessage, but also they felt passionately about it.
To give you some context, WhatsApp is now by far the most popular way to message in the world, with more than two billion users and 70 per cent of Brits aged 16-64 chatting on it, while iMessage accounts for a lowly 30 per cent of messenger app usage. But more pertinently, the number of iMessage users worldwide jumped by about 20 per cent between 2021 and 2022 and continues to rise. After all, what could be less cool than using the same messaging system as Boris Johnson et al?
Advertisement
Flo Swift, 31, a stylist from London, is one such iMessage loyalist. Along with a preference for the iMessage aesthetic — “It’s so much chicer” — she echoes my sister’s sentiment that the immediacy of WhatsApp gives her a feeling that her privacy is being compromised. “If someone whatsapps me, I feel like they’re looking through their phone at me,” she says. “It gives me anxiety. There’s always people typing things that I don’t want to respond to.”
This resonates with Abbi Fletcher, 29, a climate emergency project manager at UAL. “You get so many notifications on WhatsApp that you end up not replying to them. I don’t reply to anyone properly on WhatsApp, which makes me feel like a bad person. Can we not simply converse with one other person and go back to old-school communication?”
This reaction doesn’t surprise Dr Martha Newson, a cognitive anthropologist and professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich, who says that communication overload is a reality of modern life. “The human brain can’t sustain mass communication, as you can only listen to a few people at once. We can’t deal with so much information.” Our hunter-gatherer forbears communicated with each other throughout the day, but there were always lulls, particularly at night-time, she continues. “The problem with fast-paced messaging services is that you’re interrupted at all hours of the day, especially if you are following people across time zones. Because we may get a dopamine hit when people message us, we are seeking to engage with that, even when it goes against aspects of our health like sleep.”
The wellness movement is so deeply entrenched in our culture nowadays, it was inevitable it would trickle down to our digital lives too. Like the trend towards sobriety among Gen Z, boycotting superfluous messaging apps when they start to cause mental health struggles makes sense. For the artist Grace Armstrong, 26, iMessage feels like a much healthier form of communication: “I love the simplicity of a text, as I find it weirdly comforting. I find that texts feel more sincere — if someone has texted you it feels more legit and real than a WhatsApp.” She extends the same logic to dating: “I love it when a boy texts, it feels like such a green flag.”
And like sobriety or any lifestyle choice in opposition to the mainstream, it begins to form part of our identity, Newson tells me, which explains why the iMessagers I speak to are so zealous on the subject. In a world of read receipts and “bday bank deets” groups, iMessage is not only a lifestyle choice, it’s a “f*** you” to the Man, or as Armstrong so deftly puts it: “iMessage is just superior to WhatsApp, similar to people who prefer cats to dogs — they’re just better people.”