Colin Sheridan: Obsessing over WhatsApp 'ticks' while waiting to hear from Gaza
There are arguably few things crueller in modern life than watching someone you care deeply for appear online, start typing, then suddenly disappear into the ether. File picture
One of my oldest friends is in Gaza. He was there long before October, and almost every day since. If one were to ask how I’d define our friendship, I would say ours is not one built on the fickle foundation of constant communication. I think we bought our first mobile phones together in 1998, and he has had the same number since.
It would be impossible to count the number of messages we’ve exchanged between this and then, and it really doesn’t matter, because ours was simply not the type of friendship that ever required constant attention. If water lilies need moisture every day, then we were a pair of cacti, impervious to drought. Messages often lay unanswered for days, sometimes weeks. Their reciprocation or otherwise was never indicative of our relationship. If we needed each other, we called. Blue ticks never mattered. I can tell you today with all the conviction of a man beside himself with perpetual worry, that they do now.
Anybody who’s ever experienced a loved one caught up in a “world event,” will understand all too well the pros and cons of modern communicative technology. The ability to reach out to someone immediately and ascertain their wellbeing can be phenomenally helpful in assuaging the crippling anxiety that comes with learning their lives are in danger.
Conversely, when that technology fails or malfunctions, or worse, does exactly what it’s supposed to do, it takes on a Godlike presence in your life. It makes or breaks your day.
For when a messaging service on your phone can alert you, the sender, that the intended recipient either has or has not read the message, or worse, they have read it but not responded, or worse again, they never received it at all, it has you by the throat, pinned to the wall, unable to breathe.
We live in an age of blue ticks. And there is no greater world event ongoing than what is happening in Gaza. If you have a loved one there, every day is likely dominated by an obsessive checking of your phone to see has your WhatsApp message delivered. Did it get one tick, or two? What does the “last seen” say? If it was blue ticked, why have they not responded?
There, but not there
There are arguably few things crueller in modern life than watching someone you care deeply for appear online, start typing, then suddenly disappear into the ether.
Broken-hearted lovers know this, too. This has happened countless times to me as a friend in the last few months. I can only imagine the absurd trauma it has caused hundreds of thousands of others all around the world. People are there, on a screen, looking at the exact same thing you are. You can see them. Then, they are gone.
In the opening chapter of her magnificent exploration of the brutality of the migrant trail, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Sally Hayden writes about receiving a Facebook message. “Hi sister Sally, we need your help,’ it read.
“We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story.”
A trickle of messages to Hayden soon became a tsunami. Many of them came from migrants in camps who were sharing sim cards at the risk of death. If Hayden was relying on single ticks, double ticks, and blue ticks to learn of the actual life or death status of those strangers speaking to her, imagine the obsessive anxiety of loved ones, watching the status of messages sent in vain hope that they be delivered, be read, replied to, not knowing whether their sons or daughters were alive, or dead.
Another friend of mine — not in Gaza — sent me a screenshot of a group WhatsApp message during the week. The message was the length of a short story and was related to the contested ownership of a pair of football gloves left behind at U-8s girls’ football training.
It was a rollercoaster of emotion, of intrigue, of accusation, and counter-accusation. Passive aggression intertwined with melodrama. Chekov meets Emily in Paris. I thought — at first glance — that the message was contrived, but you could not contrive this.
It was a wild ride of relentless navel-gazing, an unravelling of a not-too-busy mind, or maybe a mind so busy it was easier to immerse oneself in the gloves. The goddam gloves. Their whereabouts. Their journey. Their eventual destination.
I realised later that, buried within my phone, muted, and ignored, were dozens and dozens of unread football glove dramas playing out that I was unaware of.
I say this not to sound superior. Our phones have morphed from the accessories they once were when my friend and I first bought ours a quarter of a century ago, to a necessary appendage. There is limitless room on them — in them — for both the life-altering alerts, and the utterly mundane. It just seems somewhat absurd that they somehow share the same space.