…including, me. On that list.
I think part of what’s disquieting is that there is a “formal text English” that exists (and people know about), but people use it only in certain circumstances, like when you’re texting a group of people that you don’t know very well, and that you don’t want to offend, or that you want to seem “proper” for.
It’s temping to think that what we observe on these lists is how those people are, but every now and then someone on my list will post a message intended for someone else…and it no longer fits “formal text English”.
I suspect this language’s use is highly contextual. To me, part of the the oddness of it all is that I would almost never use formal text English in the contexts shown in these marketing images.
Now I think about it, that's probably an autistic trait. I kind of have to carefully construct what I'm saying in any context, and it looks like this.
My texts from my iPhone look like they were created by an AI trained on deranged monkeys attempting to recreate Shakespeare.
posted from my iPhone
For me, technology bends to my will, not the other way around.
> Does the Dimension Apple exist?
> For a long time I have enjoyed the stilted, improbable cheeriness of fake Apple texts for their extreme distance from my own texting habits and experiences. (As my friend Emma put it to our group chat “if any of you texted me like this I would immediately call your significant others to make sure you hadn’t been kidnapped.”) But in the last year or so I have realized that Dimension Apple does exist--or at least overlaps with our own--in one very specific place: The WhatsApp groups that the parents at my son’s daycare/school create to share information or set up play dates. In these groups, and only in these groups, do I encounter the same kind of earnest helpfulness and baffling ebullience that exists in the Dimension Apple. Naturally, I find them totally alienating.
It's the overly formalized way everyone seems to interact regarding anything, the formulation of every little remark showing signs of a communication environment where the participants take care to conform to certain social norms and expectations, like normal people _would_ in spaces with such unspoken constraints (like the list of their block for example) -- but they seem to do that with close friends and family!