Tooru stares at his iphone 6. He's no phone addict, at least he is trying not to be. For the last two weeks or so he had been struggling to limit his screen time, and thankfully it worked. He now only spends one and a half hour on the phone everyday. His most used application, it says in the settings, is messenger.

Tooru feels strange and weirded out by this fact. Is he really communicating that much? It sure not felt like it, he found himself increasingly more silent and unsociable these days. His school week is marked with working and walking around the halls, or sitting in the common room reading and thinking. The few times he does speak is when he's presenting an idea, or simply in his boring debate club. Tooru does not think he's bad at talking to people, in fact he believes himself to be quite good at this skill, at being the charismatic person when he truly needs to be, like killing every single interview he took part in for example. He doesn't engage in conversations with his peers at school, small talks are in his mind the utmost unimportant thing and he does not contact them on the internet. Who in the world is he talking to?

It sounds like Tooru has no friends, but he does. His closest people whom he talk to are no where near the small town he is living in, most of them overseas. He's never met these people, he doesn't know what they look like and how they would act on a daily basis, he doesn't know anything except for the things they tell him, he also doesn't know when they can be lying. But it doesn't really matter, what's important is that they understands him, they supports him, they are the people he feels comfortable connecting and listening to. Right ?

Wrong.

It hits him. If those hours spent chatting away online are really quality social time, then why does he feel like he's not talking to people enough? Why does he feels alone sometimes? If he's so sure these communications have meaning, why did he had to look so hard for them in the first place?

It's an illusion. Tooru is not socializing by being on messenger, no one can socialize by being on whatever "social" media platform or messaging applications. You can try to convince yourself that you are in the moment, but your brain will never be able to recognize it as mutual conversing, like how its supposed to be.

Imagine your average day, you sit down and open messenger. You take a good look at who's online, people on your "friend" list, and you start texting those people. Its not always easy of course, striking up a conversation, you may even have to watch their stories to break the ice, but at least there's a way. You text multiple people at once, the more the merrier, the more likely you'll get an immediate reply. As you get into conversations after conversations, you jumped from inbox to inbox, sending a few text here, dropping a like there, attach a hilarious meme to one and maybe gossip about a recent internet drama to another, all in an absolutely private hyperspace. Before you know it, you're busy talking to all these "friends", what a cool sociable person you are.

Wake up, you're not. If people really talk to each other the way they do on messenger, firstly, they wouldn't whip out a dick pic or some nudes and secondly, they're probably mad. Its the equivalent of sitting in a comfy room  alone with a person and talking for a few sentences, and then immediately ran out to the next room and talk to another one while your "friend" is thinking about how to reply. Its the equivalent of standing in the middle of a small circle of people, each of them talking to you about a different story (with you of course replying to everyone) while doing the exact same thing themselves in their own circle. This rabbit hop from inbox to inbox, pursuing unfinished stories in a chaotic cacophony of notifications, videos and images, is one of the reasons why you don't have meaningful conversations when using these apps. This way of chatting reduces the interactions between humans, boiling it down by the sentences, and cutting out the essential flow of emotions and tone important to understand the message. It feels as if it was only meant to convey short, fast, simple text. Well that's because it is, it was made that way, and it's doing its job perfectly well.  Don't even get me started on how fragile your privacy is, Zucc can probably sees your inbox if he wants to and so does the CIA if you live in the States.

You would think that if you simply chat with people one by one, the problem will be solved. As if you can really do that, there's a reason why this is possible and that so many people are doing it. We text so many people at once, because we don't want to have to wait for their reply. We know too well that they might not reply to us right away, or even bother to reply at all. We don't want to put ourselves over the feeling of waiting, to be left with ourselves without anything to do, to simply feel like we might not be wanted or that we're a little bit desperate. Nothing is worst than striking up a conversation and receiving no reply, its like when someone ignores your good morning or hello in public, only this time much more privately. Don't we just love the sensation of being happily surrounded by others, to actively and in someway busily chat to people, it genuinely makes us feel as if we're not at all lonely and very much nice, great, cool, that we are cared for by many .We HAVE to keep ourselves busy when we're on social media, could be through scrolling newsfeed, reading comments, or in this case texting, because we come there for that very own reason: to make our lives seems less mundane and boring.

Saying that messenger was made for clearcut, simple messages is probably wrong, although the messaging application it was based on definitely was. There would be no need to know when your friend is online if all you wanted to do was to send them information, like the homework for tomorrow. Instead, it is made that way just so you are aware of people that are in the same situation. Every green lit dot on your friendlist is another sign telling you that the person is free, that they're not doing anything and are open to conversations (lets face it you wouldn't be online when you're focusing on something deemed important). Now with fruitless yet addictive games and a hundred added features, messenger is dedicating itself to cater for those green lonely souls that pops up on its platform everyday, even more equipped to waste your time.