The Signals we Don’t Send

I haven’t seen all that many dawns, and many of those I have seen can be blamed on my father. One of those people who believe suggested check-in times leave far too much to chance, most childhood holidays started when the sky was the same colour as my sleep-deprived humour. One year he even contrived to have us at JFK before any of the staff.

Were I Australian, the situation might be different. Over the weekend, across that vast land, people gathered at sunrise to celebrate Anzac Day, the annual celebration of those who have served.

I say might, because the modicum of self-awareness I possess leads me to suspect I would find it strangely easy to roll over when the time came and go back to sleep. There’s always next year. No-one particularly wants to be up at dawn.

Which is, in part, the point. For while the timing commemorates the moment the beaches at Gallipoli were stormed, it also imposes a slight cost on those who attend. And that cost adds value to the signal they send. Not only do those present want to pay their respects, but they are willing to make a small sacrifice to do so. Not a sacrifice on the scale of those who served, but a sacrifice nonetheless.

The day before Anzac Day, I had woken up, sun safely over the horizon, to be told by Facebook that it was the birthday of two girls with whom I had been at school. Not only did it pass on the happy news, but it gave me a response. Two messages all typed up and ready to be sent. All I needed to do was click. Done and dusted in a couple of seconds.

In the analogue age, it was a more Anzac Day-like performance. I would have needed to remember (not a bar I am confident I would have crossed, to be honest). I would have had to buy a card and a stamp. I would have had to write and address it, take it to the post box. All rather more burdensome than clicking a button. Early credit cards, it was said, took “the waiting out of wanting”. Social media takes the cost out of caring.

Or does it? For the signals we give exist in a context. People know what is involved in sending a birthday card and Facebook users know what is involved in sending a Facebook message. They know the former has cost time and money, while the latter, bluntly, hasn’t. Go to the effort of sending a card and I can be reasonably sure you like me. You think I am worth the effort. Pass on an auto-generated message and I can’t. Maybe you were just being polite. Maybe you were idly scrolling, saw it and thought, “Why not?” (We can, of course, edit the message slightly to show some degree of investment).

If the information in a signal declines as it becomes easier to make, the information contained in not making it rises. If you didn’t send me a card, there are many ways I can explain that – maybe you just forgot (there are only so many birthdays someone can remember), maybe you don’t have my address. Perhaps you were busy. Maybe cash is a bit tight (have you seen the cost of stamps these days?) If social media tells you it is my birthday, gives you a ready-made message, and you still can’t be bothered to spend a second sending it, what does that mean? If you won’t even bear that cost, then surely you really don’t care.

As we have noted before, it is difficult if not impossible to rule out all but one explanation for an event. Perhaps someone just doesn’t send birthday messages. Perhaps they don’t check their notifications. But failing to act when the cost of action is so low makes it more likely that an individual just doesn’t want to act. They don’t think it a good use of their time and effort.

The recipient might not know, but the sender probably does. Signals give information both to signaller and signallee. If, despite the minimal burden of doing so and having no other excuse, you still can’t be bothered to pass on your greetings, then it is reasonable to assume that you really don’t care.

There is nothing wrong with this. It is unreasonable to expect that we will have the same feelings for someone last seen three decades ago as for someone last seen three days ago. But admitting this involves admitting that there is a gap between how we live our lives and how we think about them.

We tend to take a “longue duree” approach to ourselves. We are persisting entities who stretch over time from birth to wherever we are now. This is a view social media encourages. As we go through life, we acquire connections and we rarely lose them. Facebook friends are like doctors – they have to do something really bad before we strike them off. The result is a flattening. To the algo, information about the birthday of the kid we last saw in seventh grade is just as important as that of the person we’re having supper with tomorrow.

In reality, though, it isn’t. It might be interesting, but it has no particular relevance. Whatever we may claim, we divide our life into chapters. School, university, work etc. And only a select number of characters make it through the whole novel. The rest we confine to our emotional history; frozen, like the Lost Boys, at the age they entered the Neverland of our memories.

Social media thaws them out. And ages them (enough time has passed that the birthday celebrants might be flattered rather than insulted to be described as girls). It offers the possibility of renewed connections. But it cannot make us care. On the contrary, it can show us that we don’t. Not really.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” wrote Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Social media is a stream taking us back to who we were, but in so doing, it takes us away from who we are.

We do have the power to change this, to fight the inertia. A while back I pruned my contact list. Thinking about this piece brought one name back to mind. But I unfriended more than one person…

Brutal? Perhaps. But if you can’t take a second to wish someone a happy birthday, do you really want their holiday snaps?

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.

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