信息该不该秒回？父母、老板、恋人、朋友，时不时地发来短信。频频的手机震动声令我们感到焦虑，但很多时候我们还是选择拖着不回。甚至有时候“看过了”，就产生了已经回复对方的错觉，继续忙着手头上的事最后忘得一干二净。另一方面，科学研究表明“秒回”这种过于主动的表现，易降低自己在恋人眼中的吸引力，你是否有这样的顾虑呢？
“在吗？”“不在！”
作者：Julie Beck
译者：朱星汉
校对：朱小钊
导读笔记：泮海伦
策划：泮海伦&王瑞
How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails
无视短信和邮件是如何成为常态的？
本文选自 The Atlantic | 取经号原创翻译
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The defining feature of conversation is the expectation of a response. It would just be a monologue without one. In person, or on the phone, those responses come astoundingly quickly: After one person has spoken, the other replies in an average of just 200 milliseconds.
人们在交谈中总是期待得到对方的答复，这是对话最重要的特点。没有答复，便是唱独角戏。不管是面对面还是打电话，人们总是能很快得到答复，一方说完话，另一方回复的平均时间只有0.2秒。
In recent decades, written communication has caught up—or at least come as close as it’s likely to get to mimicking the speed of regular conversation (until they implant thought-to-text microchips in our brains). It takes more than 200 milliseconds to compose a text, but it’s not called “instant” messaging for nothing: There is an understanding that any message you send can be replied to more or less immediately.
近几十年来，文本通讯的交流速度已经赶上，或者说至少已接近我们平常对话的速度（只差没在脑子里植入将思想转化为文本的芯片了）。虽然编辑一条信息需要至少0.2秒，但“即时通讯”的意义在于，人们都清楚信息发出后，对方几乎可以立即回复。
But there is also an understanding that you don’t have to reply to any message you receive immediately. As much as these communication tools are designed to be instant, they are also easily ignored. And ignore them we do. Texts go unanswered for hours or days, emails sit in inboxes for so long that “Sorry for the delayed response” has gone from earnest apology to punchline.
但人们也清楚自己没有必要立即回复刚收到的信息。即时通讯工具有即时性的特点，但也同时容易被忽略，这一现象也存在。几个小时乃至几天都不回复信息，收件箱中邮件堆积如山，“抱歉这么晚才回复”已经从真挚的道歉变为了一句笑料。
People don’t need fancy technology to ignore each other, of course: It takes just as little effort to avoid responding to a letter, or a voicemail, or not to answer the door when the Girl Scouts come knocking. As Naomi Barion, a linguist at American University who studies language and technology, puts it, “We’ve dissed people in lots of formats before.” But what’s different now, she says, is that “media that are in principle asynchronous increasingly function as if they are synchronous.”
如果人们不想理会他人，根本不需要利用什么复杂的科技，也无需多费心力就能忽略掉一条信息、一条语音，或者当女童子军的组织人员（一个世界性组织，训练女童的公民意识和领导才干，培养她们的爱国主义精神）来敲门时假装没听见。美利坚大学主攻语言和科技方向的语言学家内奥米·巴伦表示：“我们侮辱人的方式千变万化”，但现在不同的地方在于，“通讯媒介本质上是异步的，但在功能性上却显得像是同步的。”
The result is the sense that everyone could get back to you immediately, if they wanted to—and the anxiety that follows when they don’t. But the paradox of this age of communication is that this anxiety is the price of convenience. People are happy to make the trade to gain the ability to respond whenever they feel like it.
结果，你觉得每个人只要愿意便能随时回复你，但如果他们没有及时回复，焦虑感就袭来了。即时通讯时代所塑造的矛盾是，你不想焦虑，就必须放弃可以随心所欲回复信息的自在。而人们更愿意承受焦虑，获得挑选回复时间的自由。
While you may know, rationally, that there are plenty of good reasons for someone not to respond to a text or an email—they’re busy, they haven’t seen the message yet, they’re thinking about what they want to say—it doesn’t always feel that way in a society where everyone seems to be on their smartphone all the time. A Pew survey found that 90 percent of cellphone owners “frequently” carry their phone with them, and 76 percent say they turn their phone off “rarely” or “never.” In one small 2015 study, young adults checked their phones an average of 85 times a day. Combine that with the increasing social acceptability of using your smartphone when you’re with other people, and it’s reasonable to expect that it probably doesn’t take that long for a recipient to see any given message.
你可能知道从常理上来说，不回信息/邮件确有无数种正当理由：忙、没看到、在思考如何措辞，但现在几乎所有人都围着手机转，这些理由未必总是站得住脚。皮尤研究中心的报告指出，90% 的手机用户差不多走到哪都带会着自己的手机，76%的人称自己很少或从来不关闭手机。另外一份2015年的小型研究报告则显示，青年人平均一天要查看85次手机，再加上当今社会越来越多人在和他人相处时仍然在玩手机，因此看一下未读信息可能并不需要花费太长时间，这样的想法并无不合理之处。
“You create for people an environment where they feel as though they could be responded to instantaneously, and then people don’t do that. And that just has anxiety all over it,” says Sherry Turkle, the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
负责“科技与自我”研究项目的麻省理工学院教授雪莉·特克尔认为：“你给大众创造了一个让他们觉得仿佛发出的信息随时可以得到回复的环境，但回信息的一方偏偏选择推迟回复，所以社会中才弥漫着焦虑感。”
It’s anxiety-inducing because written communication is now designed to mimic conversation—but only when it comes to timing. It allows for a fast back-and-forth dialogue, but without any of the additional context of body language, facial expression, and intonation. It’s harder, for example, to tell that someone found your word choice off-putting, and thus to correct it in real-time, or try to explain yourself better. When someone’s in front of you, “you do get to see the shadow of your words across someone else’s face,” Turkle says.
将数字信息沟通设计成和真实对话相仿（必须在双方均保持实时互动的前提下）的方式容易导致焦虑，虽然通过数字信息人们可以即时交流，但是感受不到肢体语言、面部表情和声音语调这类额外信息。例如，你很难看出对方对你的措辞颇有微词，因此你也没有机会立刻改正，或者换成更合适的措辞。雪莉表示，在面对面交谈时，“如果你措辞不当，能真切地扫到对方脸上的阴沉。”
In last month’s viral New Yorker short story “Cat Person,” a young woman embarks on a failed romantic relationship with a man she meets at the movie theater where she works. They only go on one date in the story; they get to know each other primarily over text. When the affair ends messily, it reveals not only how the bubble of romantic expectations can be
pop
ped by reality’s needle, but also how weak digital communication is as a scaffolding on which to build an understanding of another person.
2017年12月，《纽约客》上刊登的爆款短篇小说《猫人》讲述了一位年轻女性经历的一段失败的感情。她和男友在她工作的电影院相遇，两人只约会过一次，他们主要通过发短信了解对方，当两人的恋情最后潦草收场时，这篇小说不仅说明了现实会
戳破
爱情的泡沫，更揭示了通过数字信息进行互动本就是不靠谱的交流方式，更别提要在其基础上去了解一个人。
pop
/pɒp / v. ~ (sth) to burst, or make sth burst, with a short explosive sound （使）爆裂，发爆裂声
In an interview, the story’s author, Kristen Roupenian, said the piece was inspired by “the strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks, whether online or off.” Indeed, even for the people we already know, we increasingly rely on contextless forms of communication. This puts an unusually large burden on the words themselves (and maybe some emojis) to convey what is meant. And each message, and each pause in between messages, takes on
outsize
importance.
小说的作者克莉丝汀·罗佩尼安在访谈中表示，我们根据一些稀奇古怪、站不住脚的证据去揣测我们社交网络（不论线上线下）之外的那些仅仅通过文字去了解的人。即便是熟悉的人，我们也免不了越来越依赖文字去了解他们，文字负载了太多信息量（或许还有表情包），每一条信息，每一次消息间的停顿，都
举足轻重
。
outsize
/ˈaʊtsaɪz / adj. larger than the usual size 较大的；超过一般型号的
“Text messages become marks on rocks to be analyzed and sweated over,” Turkle says.
特克尔表示：“文本信息已经成为了石头上值得人们反复研究的标记，而他们还不忘将石头翻来覆去，反复检查。”
It’s not always easy to figure out what someone meant to convey by using a certain emoji, or by waiting three days to text you back. Different people have different ideas about how long it’s appropriate to wait to respond. As Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, wrote in The Atlantic, the signals that are sent by how people communicate online—the “metamessages” that accompany the literal messages—can easily be misinterpreted:
某人发的表情包到底是什么意思，三天才回复消息又是什么意思，这些都不好弄明白。不同的人对于回复消息的合适时机有不同的见解，乔治城大学的语言学家德博拉·塔内在《大西洋月刊》中写到，人们线上交流中透露的隐含信息（字面含义之外的信息）很容易被他人误解。
Human beings are always in the business of making meaning and interpreting meaning. Because there are options to choose from when sending a message, like which platform to use and how to use it, we see meaning in the choice that was made. But because the technologies, and the conventions for using them, are so new and are changing so fast, even close friends and relatives have differing ideas about how they should be used. And because metamessages are implied rather than stated, they can be misinterpreted or missed entirely.
人类总是在赋予含义和解释含义，但因为我们在何时发送消息、选择哪个平台发送、如何使用这个平台上有不同的选择，因此我们会根据人们的选择去解释其背后的含义。但科技产品日新月异，使用的习惯也随之改变，即便是彼此最亲密的朋友和亲人，对于应该如何利用科技也有不同的看法。而且隐含信息是隐晦而非明说的，因此人们可能会完全误解或者完全漏掉这层信息。
This metamessage
opacity spaw
n
s thousands of other text messages a year, as people enlist their friends to help interpret exactly what their romantic interest
meant by a certain turn of phrase, or whether a week-long radio silence means they’re being ghosted. (The New Yorker parodied this collaborative textual analysis in a video in which a group of women gather, war-room style, to answer the question “Was It a Date?”)
由于隐含的信息过于
晦涩
，人们每年还会为此
额外发送
数千条信息，请朋友来帮忙鉴定对方的某些话语到底传达了什么暧昧的暗示，或是如果对方一周没有联系你是否意味着你们之间玩完了。（《纽约客》拍摄了一个视频，视频中还原了这种通力合作，分析信息的场景，一些女性围坐在一起讨论“对方是在约你吗？”，就像身处作战室一般。）
opacity
/əʊˈpæsəti / n. (formal) the fact of being difficult to understand; the fact of being opaque 费解；难懂；模糊
spawn
/spɔːn / v. ~ sth (often disapproving) to cause sth to develop or be produced 引发；引起；导致；造成
Features intended to add clarity—like read recepits or the little bubble with the ellipses in iMessage that tells you when someone is typing (which is apparently called the “typing awareness indicator”)—often just cause more anxiety, by offering definitive evidence for when someone is ignoring you or started to reply only to put it off longer.
有一些社交软件为了提高信息交互的透明度而使用一些招数，类似于已读通知或者iMessage中告知你对方正在输入的椭圆形气泡（显然，这个叫“输入状态指示器”），这往往会使人们更加焦虑，因为它们可能成为对方真的是在无视你或刻意延迟回复的铁证。
But just because people know how stressful it can be to wait for a reply to what they thought would be an instant message doesn’t mean they won’t ignore others’ messages in turn.
尽管人们都清楚明明可以立即回复的消息非要拖延的行为能让人抓狂，但这不代表他们自己就不会忽略别人的消息。
Sometimes people don’t respond as a way of deliberately signaling they’re annoyed, or that they don’t want to continue a relationship. Turkle says sometimes taking a long time to write back is a way of establishing dominance in a relationship, by making yourself look simply too busy and important to reply.
有些时候，人们不回，是有意表明自己不堪其扰，或者想结束这段关系。特克尔认为，有时候故意隔很长时间才回复消息是为了显得你自己很忙、有要事在身，从而在关系中获得主导地位。
But oftentimes, people are just trying to manage the quantity of messages and notifications they receive. In 2015, the average American was receiving 88 business emails per day, according to the market research firm Radicati, but only sending 34 business emails per day. Because—who has the time to respond to 88 emails a day? Maybe someone isn’t responding because they’ve realized the interruption of a notification negatively affects their productivity, so they’re ignoring their phone to get some work done.
还有些时候，人们只是想对收到的消息和提醒进行管理。市场调研公司Radicati 提供的数据显示，2015年，美国人平均一天会收到88封工作邮件，而只会发出34封。原因显而易见，谁有空一一回复？或许不想回复只是因为他们觉得收件提醒影响到了他们的工作效率，所以为了完成工作，只好忽视手机的消息提醒。
I find myself ignoring or
procrastinating
even important messages, and ones I want and intend to respond to. I had to create a bright red “Needs Response” email label to battle my own “delayed response” problem. I regularly read texts, think “I’ll respond to that later,” and then completely forget about it. Working memory—the brain’s mental to-do list—can only hold so much at once, and when notifications get crammed in with shopping lists and work tasks, sometimes it springs a leak.
我自己甚至还会
拖着
或者干脆不回一些我原本打算要回复的重要消息，为了治疗这种拖延症，我会给亟待回复的邮件打上红色的“需回复”标记。我常常在读信息时心里想着“待会就回复”，结果之后就忘得一干二净。工作记忆——大脑的任务清单，一次只能记住那么多东西，当购物清单和工作清单的消息提示太多的时候，难免有漏网之鱼。
procrastinate
/prəʊˈkræstɪneɪt / v. (formal, disapproving) to delay doing sth that you should do, usually because you do not want to do it 拖延；耽搁
“A lot of the time what’s happening is people have five conversations going on, and they just can’t really be intimate and present with five different people,” Turkle says. “So they kind of do a triage, they prioritize, they forget. Your brain is not a perfect instrument for processing texts. But it will be interpreted as though it really was a conversation, and so you can hurt people.”
特克尔表示：“许多时候，人们同时会和五个人聊天，但又实在无法和五个人保持同步交流，所以他们把哪些优先回复，哪些不回复，全都分好了类。虽然说人的大脑不是处理文本信息的最佳工具，但大脑会将处理文本信息的过程理解为正在进行一段真正的对话，所以推迟或者不回的确能伤人。”
Still, even though instant written communication can be overwhelming and anxiety-inducing, people prefer it. Americans spend more time texting than talking on the phone, and texting is the most frequent form of communication for Americans under 50.
虽然即时文本信息交流通讯既会让人不堪重负，又会引发焦虑，但人们还是愿意以这种方式交流。美国人发短信的时间要长于打电话的时间，对于50岁以下的美国人而言，发短信依旧是使用最频繁的交流方式。
While texting is popular worldwide, Baron, of American University, thinks that a strong preference for communication that can be easily ignored is a particularly American attitude. “Americans have far fewer manners in general in their communication than a lot of other societies,” she says. “The second issue is a real feeling of empowerment. I think we have become a version of power freaks, not just control freaks.”
尽管全世界都流行发信息，美利坚大学的语言学家巴伦仍认为，美国人更容易忽视别人发的消息。“通常，美国人在交流中远不如许多其他国家的人那么彬彬有礼，其次，人们享受召之即来挥之即去的赋权感，我觉得我们不仅仅是控制欲狂魔，更是某种自主权狂魔。”
In a survey Baron conducted in 2007 and 2008 of students in several countries including the United States, the things that people said they liked most about their phones were often related to control. One American woman said her favorite thing was “Constant communication when I want it (can also shut it off when I don’t).”
巴伦在2007年和2008年针对包括美国在内的若干个国家的学生展开了调查，结果显示，在谈到手机时，他们用到最多的词就是控制感。一位美国女性说：“如果我想聊天，我可以一直聊下去。（一旦我不想聊了，就可以把手机丢到一边）”
“What I have seen in this country, and I don’t know if it’s a national trait, is people wait until they think they have the perfect thing to say, as though relationships can be managed by writing the perfect thing,” Turkle says. “And I think that is something we pay a very high cost for.”
特克尔表示：“我发现，美国人只有斟酌出合适的回答才会回复别人，仿佛只有字斟句酌才能维持一段关系。我不确定这是不是美国特色。但我确定的是，我们为此付出了高昂的代价。”
In Baron’s survey, people also mentioned feeling controlled by their phones—bemoaning how dependent they were on the devices, and how the constant connectivity made them feel obligated to respond.
巴伦的报告同时指出，人们也认为手机控制了他们，他们抱怨说自己离不开手机，即时通讯软件让他们好像有义务要随时和别人保持联系。
But texts and emails don’t create as big of an obligation as phone calls, or a face-to-face conversation. When young adults are interviewed about why they don’t like making phone calls, they cite a distaste for how “invasive” they are, and a reluctance to place that burden on someone else. Written instant messages create a smokescreen of plausible deniability if someone doesn’t feel like responding, which can be relieving for the hider, and frustrating for the seeker.
这种感觉在处理信息或邮件时相对还好，打电话或面对面交谈时尤其明显。一些年轻人在采访中谈及不喜欢打电话的原因时说到，他们讨厌接电话，觉得接电话时有种被侵扰的感觉，而且他们也不愿意让他人有这种负担。即时文本信息制造了一层烟幕，如果有人不想回信息，似乎他便能将其挡在烟幕之外。结果，躲起来的一方如释重负，发消息的一方黯然神伤。
