mark as unread

In his discussion of GIF exchanges in instant message conversations, James Hodge remarks that “receiving a text message with a reaction GIF feels good, but it also produces a demand to reciprocate that often feels like a small burden” (4). In this blog post I’d like to expand upon the nature of this “small burden”—particularly its capitalist resonances—by taking a look at a related and perhaps even more taxing social media phenomenon: the read receipt.

We likely all grapple with read receipts. They alter the ways in which we interact with our devices and manage our various communication channels. I would contend that, given the choice, most of us elect not to have read receipts active across our various platforms and in our myriad conversations (the exception perhaps being the parent-child relation, in which the need for proof of life trumps the comforts of avoidance). Message previews are a saving grace in the context of apps with integrated read receipts: a chance to know without broadcasting or committing to the knowing, to have one’s cake and eat it, too. Read receipts come hand in hand socially with a duty, even an obligation, to respond—they represent a relational debt to be paid. Shirking or refusing one’s obligation to respond, on the other hand, represents an active, rather than passive, social move: it signals to the other—regardless of the actual circumstances surrounding the silence—that their message has, in fact, hit its target, and that it still does not warrant reply. The pending contract is underwritten with constant low-level anxiety for both parties concerned: the receiver, having triggered the read receipt, now senses the clock ticking and the pressure mounting for a timely and adequate response, while the sender, seeing their message read, experiences a growing sense of uncertainty and self-doubt as to the reason behind the delayed reply. We take very much for granted the immense comfort behind the mirrored excuses, “they’ll think I haven’t seen it/they probably haven’t seen it”… As Hodge contends, “this dynamic isn’t a problem per se, but it becomes one when the network or channel sustaining the possibility of this exchange never turns off” (4).

Quite literally, read receipts turn communications into transactions: the sender receives a receipt for the consumption of their message, a receipt that implies an amount paid and a service owed. I tie this indebtedness to Wendy Chun’s discussion of habit: “habit has moved from habes(to have) to addictio(to lose—to be forfeited to one's creditor). Habit is now a form of dependency, a condition of debt” (4). Do read receipts turn conversations into debt-driven networks of neoliberal internet culture? And if they do, what can we make of the different levels of obligation—or habituation—that various apps afford? Facebook messenger and Instagram direct messages include read receipts by design; platforms like iMessage allow curated read-receipt relations—maybe a significant other gets to see when you’ve read their messages, but an acquaintance or a colleague does not.

Chun contends that “social media are driven by a profound confusion of the private and public” (12). Read receipts operate in this zone of slippage. If privacy resides in the benefit-of-the-doubt buffer generated by leaving read receipts off (which is really an affordance for all parties to buy into a lie), then does the public equate the transparency of having them on? In Instagram direct message, for instance, the message is not marked as “read,” but rather as “seen.” It is not entirely clear, however who exactly is doing the seeing: the message is seen by the recipient, but it is the sender who sees that it has been seen. Read receipts, then, allow for a build-up of gazing vectors, and constitute a networked surveillance of micro-relations and social behaviors.