The anti-social network :(

recently conducted a social experiment and gave up my compulsive texting habit for a while. Instead, I had to pick up the telephone and actually ring people. It had a curious effect. Most people answered in a panic, assuming that I’d only make a phone call if it was to announce big news, such as a death, birth or imminent appearance on Big Brother. They were baffled by the truth – that I just wanted to know if they fancied a drink, and that I expected a definite answer as to where and when it would take place.

What I was encountering was people in the grip of the new sociological phenomenon of “micro co‑ordination”, as Professor Richard Ling at the IT University of Copenhagen has dubbed it. This is the idea that smartphones have revolutionised how we communicate, allowing us to make fluid and quickly changeable arrangements digitally. Gone are the days when we made plans verbally and stuck to them. Is this a good thing, though, or has it turned us into a bunch of liars and flakes?

This week, the text message is celebrating its 20th birthday. But cast your mind back to a time before smartphones. You couldn’t text a last-minute apology: “Aargh got flu, in bed, c u soon”, and settle down with a glass of wine to watch Strictly Come Dancing instead. You couldn’t email: “Meeting overrunning – can’t make lunch”, when you’d received a more appealing offer.

So ubiquitous has this fluid behaviour become that the old lie “the cheque’s in the post” has been replaced by “sry cant make it, spk soon x”. And if you wish to opt out of these new social mores, you haven’t a hope. As Prof Ling makes clear in his recent book, Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society, we are all governed by the new behaviour.

“Everybody takes it for granted that we are constantly available on [mobiles],” says Ling. “So you are effectively coerced into this kind of communication… We used to structure our plans around time and location when organising our social life. Now we just use our phones, which enables us to change and manipulate what we do.