Let’s suppose that you want to quickly share something with a friend. You grab your phone, open the WhatsApp application, and send a message to your buddy. But this person usually passes information with Messages and pays scant attention to anything else. He/she will probably never get the message.
And to make matters worse, the “notification” of a new message is often a single, discreet (way too discreet for me) tone that is easy to overlook, especially in a busy environment.
We all are creatures of habit. The minute we become acquainted with a particular application, we generally stick with it. If you usually use e-mail to communicate with your friends or associates, you will continue to do so, regardless of what the others are doing. You feel comfortable with it, so why would you switch to another convoluted app?
The obvious problem is that we now have an embarrassment of choice when it comes to messaging, and this leaves everybody a little bewildered. It seems that nobody is looking at the same partition at the same time anymore.
So, what is one to do? You probably will have to adapt and start using a different app because “If you don’t change with the times, the times are going to change you.”
If you want to stay in the loop, yes, you will have to learn how to use new applications.
For kids, it is natural; the newer the stuff, the cooler it is. Their little thumbs fly effortlessly on the phone display (yes they all have a phone) but for older folks, it is highly disturbing. It means that they will have to beg their grandchildren to teach them how to cope with this new infernal app. That’s probably what grandchildren are for; to teach their outdated grandparents how to deal with a smartphone.
To paraphrase John Green, breaking a habit “is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”
To survive, you probably will have to improvise a system to call various people. Maybe entering a specific emoji after a name on your contacts list to identify the right application to use…
The main thing is to have a method to put everybody in synch and prevent future recriminations.
Hoping that the above will be of help (especially Tamalous).
Alain