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. You cannot, by definition, know about a message you didn’t get.
And this is the problem. We are in Donald Rumsfeld’s world of unknown unknowns. In the old days there was only one method of instant communication: the landline telephone. That worked pretty well. But even on the rare occasions it didn’t work, you knew it hadn’t worked. The ‘dead’ tone, or the absence of any tone at all, told you that (as Arthur Daley once put it in Minder) ‘Buzby was knackered’. You knew your intended other party hadn’t heard you, by virtue of the simple fact that you hadn’t spoken to them.
But these days you’re never quite sure. You can reach people by email, text message, WhatsApp, Snapchat, DM on Twitter and God knows how else. And yes, some of these methods have delivery ticks or ‘read’ notifications.
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