Signal to Noise.
As I type this post, a thunderstorm is rolling in from the east valley. Over the past 45 minutes, as it moves from their neighborhood to mine, my best friend and I have been texting back and forth via Signal about the storm. It occurs to me that messaging is the perfect medium for this moment — it’s silent, so all I hear is the storm, but just as live and immediate as a phone call. There’s something that feels pure about text on a computer, or sending text between computers, but I like to imagine a phone call anyway, crackly and intermittent over the electric air. My best friend and I don’t really use the phone much; we have Signal, send SMS text messages, and even run our own Slack workspace just for the two of us. Occasionally we type conversations into a Google Doc, and there’s something exciting about the simultaneity of it: interruption as communication. I wonder what avenues exist for innovation in online messaging; it’s the same question I have for the web, and in both cases, clearly inflected by the dominance of Facebook (and Meta’s other platforms, notably Instagram and WhatsApp, here). Stagnation scares me, in a real way, but who can say “instant messaging” without thinking of AOL and AIM? Platforms come and go; people move on. Deeper than the web, the most enduring use case for the internet remains messaging — the rest is just noise.