Being Social Is About Being Private ⇥ kyrobeshay.com

Kyro Beshay:

I’m specifically talking about this new move to broadcast what pages and messages we’ve viewed, without our consent. Services like BBM have long been guilty of this, but the idea has seen increased adoption recently with services like FB Messenger and Apple’s iMessage. […]

We’re now forced into an obligation to respond to a person’s message, almost immediately.

It should be noted that iMessage requires the user to explicitly consent to delivering read receipts, and it is not turned on by default, but I see Beshay’s major point. I disagree, however, that this creates an obligation to reply. Perhaps read receipts create a sense of guilt for some, but I, for example, don’t feel pressure to reply immediately. Nor should anyone else. I’m genuinely surprised that read receipts have caused such a fuss, given that I remember using them in Outlook years ago.