Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or... See more

Because texts generally occur between two parties and on private devices, they are intimate. Because they transmit instantly and in short utterances, texts resemble conversations. But texts are also depersonalized, carrying few traces of the physical person behind them—no face, no voice, no handwriting. You cannot be certain whether a recipient is... See more