Name: The history behind text messaging's most dreadful feature
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The history behind text messaging's most dreadful feature

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You may not know the technical term “typing awareness indicator” by name, but if you’re using chat systems like Slack or send texts via iPhone, you see it on a daily basis.More often referred to as “so-and-so is typing,” TAIs (an abbreviation I just made up now, for this article) have shaped how we interact with each other. Seeing a message indicating that, say, a person you’re dating is typing out a follow-up to their initial “can we talk?” message with a never-ending typing bubble “...” — this is a moment when TAI anxiety becomes real.The technology of TAIs has been described as “,” “” or “.” Bustle helpfully (or not) pointed out from saying “I love you” to sexting to a response to a joke (followed by a long-running typing bubble, wherein you question yourself and your existence).But when I experimented with turning off TAIs on my work Slack for a mere 30 minutes, the anxiety of waiting for responses created pure drudgery, and the anxiety of not knowing when someone was typing might have even been worse than waiting with dread for a reply. So for all of the bad feelings and “tyranny” that TAIs may have inflicted on society, they're a necessary evil whose origin comes from a pure space. Or, as pure a space as a bunch of IBM developers in 1997 trying to figure out how to work with each other while debugging a project.It was while working on a chat server for the company that “someone’s typing” was invented. Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and IBM’s vice president of blockchain technologies, created the technology with co-worker Richard Redpath, which was one of the first TAIs in existence, at least as far as he — and SFGATE — can tell, . (For the record, though, Microsoft software engineer-turned-writer David Auerbach for Microsoft’s MSN Messenger Service in 1999. Cuomo and Redpath's patent was approved in November of 1999.)As Cuomo celebrating the 20th anniversary of this small bit of technology, “If necessity (and laziness) breeds invention, this is where ‘someone’s typing’ was invented.”Describing late-night debugging sessions for a chat server that evolved out of their work on a Tom Clancy video game (yes, you read that right), Cuomo said in an interview with SFGATE that while working with teams of people in different spaces, the group took to yelling at each other across the room.“We would be sitting in each other's offices and one person would run the server side, and a couple of people would run the chatting side and sometimes nothing would happen,” Cuomo recalled. “And we're like, 'Well, did you — are you typing something?' We'd start shouting out to each other in the offices. Like, 'What's going — is someone doing something, or is it broken?'”No response would generally elicit a knock on the wall to the neighboring room or calling that person’s office — this was before the cellphone age, Cuomo reminded me — even though that person was just a few feet away. (As a fellow lazy person, I completely understand.)“One morning after, I said, ‘This is ridiculous and almost comical that we're shouting,’” Cuomo said. “Sometimes I'd go home and my throat would be a little sore from yelling. And I just decided to put a debug message to echo to everyone what the person was typing. … It was really to cut down on the craziness of debugging the system.”The initial typing awarenesss indicator that Cuomo co-created was somewhat of a social disaster for the team, however. Before they reached the iconic “someone’s typing” that we know today, the first iteration literally showed everyone what team members were typing, as they were typing it. Cue the first inklings of anxiety caused by messaging.“[The typing awareness indicator] would literally put what you were typing and you would see it in real time,” Cuomo said. “And then [reactions would be], 'That's not how you spell that word.' It was getting embarrassing.”To cure this, the next iteration changed the format to hide the message content, so the typing instead showed asterisks.“As you typed, an asterisk would be in place of that letter, so it was somewhat anonymized until you were ready to send it, but sometimes you would see it as, someone would be typing [Cuomo imitates typing sounds] and then it would go backwards [Cuomo makes deleting sounds]. And then it would just say, 'yes.' And then we'd start yelling out again: 'You weren't going to say yes, you were going to say something more. What were you going to say?' It got clumsy. So we just decided on 'Dianne is typing' and just left it at that. And that's the way it stayed.”ALSOFor his part, Cuomo was amused at the anxiety he witnessed firsthand with using the technology, and said he couldn’t have imagined at first where the technology would ultimately lead. Redpath, to his credit, talked Cuomo into patenting their invention (and now Cuomo estimates that he is coming up on his 100th patent after 33 years of working at IBM).“I think there was a brilliance in Apple, who translated ‘someone’s typing’ into something more visual, into a dot-dot-dot, so it did more,” Cuomo said. “I noticed tools like Slack still use the 'someone is typing.' It has morphed in different ways, but no, I'm not surprised now, given the ‘now culture,’ how this is so ingrained in us that if we don't have the information now, the information may not be relevant in two minutes from now.”Cuomo theorizes that the “now generation” of technology users — whom he as a group who “[wants] everything to be given to them as quickly as possible in return for as little effort as possible” or “where instant information [is] at their fingertips” — have helped “someone’s typing” to flourish into the technology that we all now love to hate. Having a notion that someone is responding also ensures confidence and trust that you’re speaking with the person you think you’re speaking to, he said.Juliana Schroeder is a professor in the Management of Organizations group at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In her current research, she is looking at how different conversation modalities change the dynamics of a conversation, like how speaking to someone versus writing to them changes your impressions of the communicator.“What we found in several papers is that essentially text-based communication can be dehumanizing,” Schroeder said. “What we mean by that is that it lacks a lot of these human cues. If you don't have the human voice, you don't have the face and other things, but also that it actually makes the communicator seem less mentally capable, like less intelligent, less thoughtful, less rational and less emotional, as well.”“The preliminary work suggests that those indicators give you a little bit of insight into the mind of the other person, the person you're communicating with,” Schroeder later added. “It kind of indicates that, 'Hey, this person is thinking about what you sent them,' and so it does make people feel more connected to the person they're communicating with, if that person eventually responds.”For all the intricacies in human interaction and communication that TAIs have stirred up with their usage, it’s not a complicated idea. But what started as just a group of developers trying to find an easier way to talk to each other has turned into a long-lasting technological development.“It's interesting because an idea like [the typing awareness indicator is] a pretty simple idea,” Cuomo said. “And the internet, like many things, like Darwin, weeds out the things that matter less, and the things that are fit survive. I always sit back and wonder, why did that survive when so many things from the internet in the earlier days didn't? And I think it hit on a couple of things … I think the real timeliness of it and the trust that, yes, indeed, I am talking to that person [over chat] helped it survive the test of time.”As for the anxiety factor of his invention, Cuomo prefers to focus more on the positives. Using his wife as an example where chat bubbles actually relieve stress, he said because of COVID she checks in with her 86-year-old mother a few towns over, and when she sees those dot-dot-dots, her reaction is reassurance. “My wife says, ‘I hold my breath until I see the bubble with the dots, she's responding to me.’ … That security that you see when they’re typing, you know it’s safe.”He’s not blind to your anxiety, however, but Cuomo feels that it’s highly situational. “I think there are maybe phases of people's lives or occupations that they're in, where it's either going to be highly the source of anxiety or, you know, for relief — and I think it's a balance. I think it does work itself out over time, but I think where people are in life or what they're working on, I can see it being very much in one spot or not."“I do see the world is better with it than without it,” he later added. “I am intrigued if not amused by some of those things — I do not feel it's a tool that can be used for harm. Being able to share information and who the information is coming from, I think at its heart is a good thing.”

You may not know the technical term “typing awareness indicator” by name, but if you’re using chat systems like Slack or send texts via iPhone, you see it on a daily basis.More often referred to as “so-and-so is typing,” TAIs (an abbreviation I just made up now, for this article) have shaped how we interact with each other. Seeing a message indicating that, say, a person you’re dating is typing out a follow-up to their initial “can we talk?” message with a never-ending typing bubble “...” — this is a moment when TAI anxiety becomes real.The technology of TAIs has been described as “,” “” or...

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Dianne de Guzman

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The history behind text messaging's most dreadful feature

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