How instant communication killed conversation

We live in an age of instant communication. But communication has never been less certain.

Once in a while, WhatsApp takes several days to deliver a message to me. The first I know that someone contacted me on Friday is when my phone pings on Tuesday. Like when a friend let me know he and his partner were getting engaged. ‘Congratulations,’ I began, before noticing he’d sent the message four days previously. So then I had to add an apology to my response.

Text messages can also fail. Another friend recently changed phones, and realised after a few days that some (though not all) of his contacts’ texts were going to the old phone, whose battery was drained. His theorising about why this might be included such phrases as ‘SIM card lag’. He then advised me to stick to WhatsApp: ‘I definitely get messages that way.’ But you only know about the ones you get.