Don't WhatsApp me

The internet messaging service is the work of Lucifer

The irritatingly named messenger service WhatsApp is a mash up of text messaging and email that is immeasurably worse than either of them. If you doubt this, look at your recent messages. How many of them would have been sent if someone had to take the trouble to type out your email address? How many would have been sent if the sender knew they would appear on your phone through the relatively dignified medium of a text message? Half of them, at best. Probably one in ten.

WhatsApp is a cancer. It makes it too easy to send too many messages to too many people. Unlike an email, a WhatsApp message can be sent almost unthinkingly. Unlike text messaging, which has at least a nominal fee, WhatsApp messages are totally free. And when I say free, I mean worthless.

Crucially, WhatsApp makes it too easy to forward messages to people. Dozens of people at a time. The consequence of this is an endless flow of boomer memes, links to news stories you’ve already read, dad jokes, Barry photos, outright pornography and YouTube videos of wildly varying quality. This cascading digital effluent arrives alongside semi-personal messages telling you that a celebrity has died and that a lad you went to university is enjoying a drink.

The only sane response to this indiscriminate bombardment of trivia is to turn of all notifications. Unless you want your phone flashing 24 hours a day with obscenities and being woken up five times a night while someone in Australia splits one sentence over ten messages, all badges, banners, sounds and ‘notification groupings’ (whatever they are) have to go.

If you do this, you can glance through it when you have nothing else to do, as with other garbage Meta products like Instagram. It is an elegant solution, but here’s the rub: some people insist on using WhatsApp as a legitimate means of communication.

The only people worse than frivolous WhatsApp users are serious WhatsApp users. This is what my WhatsApp profile says:

If it were Twitter, people would read that, but as it’s WhatsApp they don’t, and so I continue to receive urgent communiqués ranging from ‘turn on Channel 4 now’ to ‘3-0!’ to ‘can we interview you in half an hour?’

The last of these is the most significant for me. In my line of work, I get quite a few requests from the media to comment on things and I am usually happy to oblige. Alas, researchers in the broadcast media seem to communicate solely through the medium of WhatsApp these days. I am told they do this because they can see whether the recipient has seen their message promptly. If so, they don’t take full advantage of it, because I hardly ever see the message promptly and yet they don’t phone me up instead. I often only see them when I’m tooling around on my phone hours later when work-related requests and messages such as ‘Your house is on fire’ have to compete with football banter and long threads from people whose children happen to go to the same school as mine.

Just e-mail me. Or call if it’s urgent. With email, you can set an out-of-office message so people understand why you haven’t replied. With email, you can flag up a message and deal with it properly later. With email, you can send and receive attachments (I know you can do this with WhatsApp but what kind of lunatic reads a 40 page PDF on a two inch screen? The same goes for YouTube clips. I don’t watch videos on my phone because I am not 12 years old. If you send me a video longer than 20 seconds on WhatsApp, you might as well encrypt it.)

Ideally, I could forward this stuff to my email and look at it later on my desktop but that is yet another option the makers of WhatsApp have closed off to us. Yes, I know there is a desktop version of the app but it’s rubbish. There isn’t an iPad version at all, even though iPads are just big iPhones, although there is a bootleg version which is also atrocious.

Let’s face it, WhatsApp is for mobile phones and mobile phones only. It is for people who are always on their mobile phones. Whilst I have nothing against such people, I will never be one of them. If you don’t deal with a WhatsApp message there and then you never will, and so I never do.

Apologists for WhatsApp claim that this malignant technology has three benefits over e-mail and texts. None of them stack up.

Firstly, they say it allows you to read your messages without being online. This could a boon if you are trapped in a basement and want to read some gossip from people you barely know, but you have to sacrifice gigabytes of storage on your phone for this dubious benefit because the app automatically saves every bit of internet flotsam that comes your way, each of which has to deleted manually and individually.

Secondly, they say you can make phone calls on it. I suppose this could come in handy on the vanishingly rare occasions when you have wi-fi but no phone signal, but the more typical scenario is that you are walking down the street or driving your car when someone calls you on WhatsApp and you have to sacrifice precious data for a call you didn’t even instigate, which strikes me as taking liberties.

Thirdly, they say that WhatsApp is encrypted at both ends and therefore protects you from all those Chinese hackers who want to know what time you’re meeting the lads on Sunday. Politicians like it for that reason. It is supposed to be secure and confidential. But whenever the newspapers get hold of incriminating messages from disloyal MPs or racist policemen, what platform are they harvested from? It is invariably WhatsApp.

This is hardly surprising because you only know who half the people in the group chat are. There was a time when if someone had your mobile number it was because you’d given it to them. You knew them and they knew you. Those days are over thanks to WhatsApp. Now everyone has everyone’s phone number but no names to go with them.

Who are these all people messaging me and how did they get my number? Sometimes they are complete strangers, which is weird. Sometimes it’s clear from the message that you must know them. Apparently they know you. But you can’t work out who they are because you haven’t got their number in your phone and their profile pic doesn’t show their face. And so you have to ask a series of subtle questions in an effort to tease out their identity. This is not progress, my friends. We have gone backwards.

No doubt there will be some WhatsApp nerds reading this who will tell me that there are things I can do in the settings to resolve some of problems outlined above. Don’t put them in the comments. I am not interested. The real solution is for everyone in the world to simply stop using WhatsApp immediately.