Living in a tethered world, where everyone we know has a cell phone and a facebook or twitter acount, is an anxious world to live in. Being constantly connected to the people we care about most (i.e. parents, friends, lovers) carries with it a necessity to know what is happening in the other persons world at all times. I encountered a situation last night where one of my friends had been talking to her boyfriend earlier in the day and he had stopped responding to her texts kind of abruptly. She had texted him then saying she didn't like how the conversation ended and he didn't answer for an hour and half. When she called me over to her room she was freaking out that something bad had happened to him in that hour and a half. She was very confused as to why he hadn't answered her texts or calls. I tried to console her telling her he was probably just being a stupid boy and forgot his phone in his room or something but it did not calm her down.
We live in a world full of instant gratification. When you send someone a text, you get a reply within ten minutes, always. If the person isn't responding, that provides an answer to your question in itself; when they don't answer our texts, we automatically think that they are saying in their minds, "I don't like you, I'm ignoring you". Some people simply can't handle this notion of being ignored or even thinking they are being ignored. This instant gratification policy is not a good thing when it comes to learning to be patient. Our world is full of impatient people who look for immediate replies to texts and emails, and when they don't get it, you get another text ten minutes later saying, "Are you mad at me?".
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