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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Not the point of the article, but this is a personal bugbear of mine - no it wasn't. Text-based communication is asynchronous.

That's irrelevant. They still get a notification to disturb them, they still can see it when looking at their phone, they can still be concerned about the content and how to respond later even if they don't answer, they can still be concerned about the content even if they don't read it, they could very well be waiting an important message at the time, they might have an experience with other people/ex-partners/etc pressuring them to answer immediately, and so on.

Technical terms like "asynchronous" don't mean anything to how people use a technology. Common social expectations do.

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They get a notification if they have chosen to receive notifications. It's not like the sender forces themselves upon someone else.

I think this and the other comments here show an important cultural difference: Western culture places more emphasis on personal responsibility: if you don't want to be disturbed, the expectation is that you turn off notifications. Japanese culture seems to be the opposite, in that you expect others to know you do not want to be disturbed, and thus you don't bother with turning off notifications.

Western culture is not an unified blob, as it encompasses wildly different languages, customs, and peoples, ranging from Sweden to Mexico.

And just the same, Japanese people are not one unified blob and each have their own preferences regarding texting, just like the rest of us.

Doesn't matter, we can still talk about Western culture (meaning mostly Anglosaxon in this context, and including Europe in others) and Japanese culture.

It's about defaults and majority/average preferences, not about "every single one does this" and it gets tiring to remind people otherwise, as if they don't know.

It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island. We don't hold enough information to understand "defaults" or "majorities". Heck, we are at Hacker News, hardly the epicenter of social butterflies.

So even if there was such a thing as default, we wouldn't know it. Let alone from a foreign country that most natives don't speak a foreign language. How many Japanese relationships did you have to form such knowledge on the majority?

Last, but not least, it is not tiring to remind people to reframe the conversation. It is healthy and constructive.

I won't argue with your perspective on Western culture. I neither agree nor disagree.

But, I will say that to a greater degree than you perhaps would imagine, Japanese people by and large do know what to expect from other Japanese in minute contextual detail. And with that knowledge, they try very hard to meet others' expectations.

>It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island.

What matters for the analogy to be useful is if there are two big clusters in east and west. Not regional differences within the clusters, or between individuals.

My wife is incredibly western and low-context. She still gets pissed off when friends and/or family in different timezones wake her up in the middle of the night with text messages.

Note that the article is from 2013, when automatic silencing of notifications at night was still relatively new. Do Not Disturb on iOS was just introduced one year prior. Previously you wouldn’t message someone at inappropriate hours, just like you wouldn’t call them.

They get a notification if they haven't actively opted out of notifications. I think there is an important distinction between "not opting out" and "choosing to"

Now on top of annoying them, now you're dictating their phone settings too?

What if they don't want to stop notifications?

What if they don't know how to do it?

What if they want to still get one from the child or partner or friend who's travelling if anything happens to them?

Should they turn it on and off for your convenience, lest you have to forego sending a non-essential text at night?

I'm not dictating anything. You don't want notifications? Great! You can disable them. You want notifications only between these sets of timespans? No problem! Oh you want blacklist/whitelist certain groups/people? Can do!

The receiver has full agency of when they receive notifications and of whom. In fact a person NOT sending a message and keeping it stored later is, in fact, taking away agency of the receiver. The sender assumes he knows better then the receivers.

>I'm not dictating anything. You don't want notifications? Great! You can disable them. You want notifications only between these sets of timespans? No problem! Oh you want blacklist/whitelist certain groups/people? Can do!

But you're still sending the message, regardless of if they want it or not, and even if obviously they might not have done those things, not know how to do those things, or simply not want to have to do those things, but still not want to have to get some message at night.

Sorry, but you're intruding with your late nightn message. And that's irrelevant to what they have or haven't set on their phone.

>In fact a person NOT sending a message and keeping it stored later is, in fact, taking away agency of the receiver. The sender assumes he knows better then the receivers.

It's not about agency, it's about courtesy.

my phone allows me to set who i get notifications from. (my settings are to silence everyone except immediate family)

if they don't know how, the first time they bring up this issue, i'll help them change their settings.

yes, there are always corner cases, and there may be a situation where it is necessary to avoid sending messages at certain times. but this can be communicated. what bothers me is people getting upset if they receive a message at the wrong time as if it was the senders fault.

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