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WhatsApp blue ticks tick people off

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Ananya Bhattacharya
Ananya BhattacharyaNov 08, 2014 | 13:06

WhatsApp blue ticks tick people off

Ignorance, they say, is bliss. Ignoring, they need to realise, is a greater bliss. And that is what the WhatsApp guys need to wake up to. It's not for nothing that people lauded the application and worshipped it day and night when they tweaked their privacy settings and made it somewhat more ignorer-friendly. People - at least some people - do not want to be seen, WhatsApp style, when they do not want to be seen. Maybe it's high time the app-tweakers realised that, no?

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The app, despite its user-friendliness, initially came with the curse of the "last seen at..." notification. Right there, in tiny letters, the insidious words spelt doom for anybody who wished to evade some certain someone's messages. It's not always advisable to bluntly ignore certain people, you see. It's not even the fear of being discovered as having ignored his/her message. After a point of time, when our parents and tech-savvy relatives bit into the forbidden apple called WhatsApp, the "last seen at..." notification began to take on impressively frightening forms. Being chided one fine morning by an offended father who happened to wake up at 4am to drink some water and ended up paying a visit to WhatsApp and discovered that his daughter had "last seen" her messages at 3.49am might not have been what many of us signed up for while letting WhatsApp take over our lives. That the daughter in question had happened to wriggle out of a particularly precarious discussion about her marriage by telling her father that she was too sleepy at 11pm the previous night never helped when she was being taken to task the next morning.

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And then there was the boss who spent a lot of time checking his team's "last seen" displays before speaking to them about their lifestyles the next morning, when their work suffered after a night when they went to sleep at 2.40am. Somehow, no one seemed to realise that the "last seen" on one's WhatsApp was not necessarily the time one went to sleep. But then, a few days later, a miracle of sorts happened. The cursed "last seen" was made an optional factor. Heartbreaks of parents and bosses apart, the move was welcomed by most users. There was a tiny price to pay for it - the quid pro quo - you don't let others see your "last seen"; you don't get to see others' "last seen". And life seemed good again. No frantic calls from parents at 5.30 in the morning when you actually went to sleep at 5.15am, and no hassled boss talking about others' bloodshot-eyed, sleepy-faced performances. The proofs had vanished. No one no longer needed to be mortified at the thought of being discovered by someone as having ignored a message - the "last seen" was buried, and with it, the fears of being caught red-handed as an ignorer.

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However, when a messaging platform is as famous and as convenient as WhatsApp, moments of joy are not meant to last forever. Now comes the menace of the blue ticks. As if the tiny "seen" message on the right hand corner of a message on the Facebook chat window wasn't traumatic enough, we're being treated to the same on this hitherto-somewhat-less-nosier platform, too, now. You want to ignore someone? But you want to respond to someone else's message on WhatsApp? You will be splashed blue, and your ignoring tactics will be bruised black. But then, necessity is the mother of invention. And when the necessity is as grave as protecting one's ignorer alter ego, the inventions are more than one.

So, while WhatsApp hits us with this bolt from the blue, with the blue ticks, one can always check the message in one's notification window and then decide whether or not it needs to be ignored. Granted, visiting the actual destination is a call most of us find too tantalising to ignore, but at times, the need to ignore the message is greater than that.

And if merely glancing at a ping on the notifications' window isn't good enough, there does exist a better method to save yourself from the curse of the blue ticks. I will unabashedly, shamelessly let go of any kind of modesty here and want some credit for this - I've been using this method of ignoring-but-not-letting-one-know-that-they-are-being-ignored for quite some time now. Switch your data off. Go visit WhatsApp; check all messages; gaze at them to your heart's content; respond to the ones you want to.

Get out and switch your data on. I have been doing this for a long time; way before WhatsApp decided to make our lives easier by installing their selective "last seen" features. Questions like "What were you doing at 4.18am today?" from parents can make one invent many methods to dodge them, you see. So, while the invasion of the app into the ignoreds' lives might not be a reversible task, the ignorer will always have the upper hand. Just don't let the WhatsApp guys find out about this. Mischief managed.

Last updated: November 08, 2014 | 13:06
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