Response tonon‐response: How people react when their smartphone messages and calls are ignored

Abstract

Smartphone‐mediated communication has become the norm for a lot of people over the last two decades. It's common to see people spend a large part of their days glued to their smartphones, maintaining constant connectivity through sending and receiving messages and calls. However, people, almost daily, experience their closed ones or professional contacts not responding to certain messages and phone calls from them. The objective of this project is to investigate the non‐response behavior and the anxiety that people experience when their messages or calls are not responded to, and the resulting adverse effect on communication. Through interviews of 24 smartphone users, we found that the majority of the participants, especially those very active on social media, were highly affected by non‐response. By better understanding individual reactions to non‐response, the study recommends solutions and a framework for effective communication using smartphones. The study demonstrates how relationships play out in smartphone‐based communication, and what we could do to make them better. The study will inform the youth, parents, teachers, employers, and the society as a whole, as we embrace changes brought about by smartphone‐mediated communication.

Disconnectedness in a connected world: why people ignore messages and calls

“…This question is not listed in Table 2. The responses for Q.29 are discussed in our paper on the sender's perspective (Agarwal and Lu, 2020).…”

“…The rest of the questions investigated as part of the larger study (i.e. the missing numbers in Table 2) can be seen in Agarwal and Lu (2020, 2021). The interview questions addressed in this study are not renumbered so that they indicate their sequence among the entire 43 questions of the larger study.…”

“…Thus, people can choose to ignore certain emails, messages or calls. Such non-response can be seen as form of social rejection or avoidance, causing anxiety to the sender of those messages (see Agarwal and Lu, 2020). However, systematic studies in communication or information science are yet to fully investigate and address these issues that people may increasingly experience.…”

“…When a receiver does not respond, chances of a negative valence (Burgoon and Hale, 1988) are much higher because the sender might interpret this as the receiver moving from a place of closeness to one of decreased immediacy or avoidance. See Agarwal and Lu (2020) for our detailed study on the impact of non-response behavior on the sender.…”

“…They might be busy or tired or base their non-response on factors such as the importance, urgency or purpose of the message or the reply, their current location, sensitivity of response content, etc. There isn't enough research on the disconnectedness that happens when people do not respond, and on its negative psychological and other impacts (see Agarwal and Lu, 2020).…”