Deactivating WhatsApp Read Receipts Defines Dialogue of the Deaf -By Ugochukwu Ugwuanyi

Communication on messaging apps remains a mortal affair – not a conversation between man and God. Pompous persons who disable the blue marker on WhatsApp make what should be an interaction seem like a supplication. This parallel applies because the ordinary Christian is usually unsure whether the Lord has heard their prayers.

Their belief in being heard by heaven stems from Isaiah 59:1, which assures that God’s ears are not too dull to hear prayers. It’s a different kettle of fish for the astute believer. They not only know that God reads their messages but also receive His response even while on the prayer altar. These sons of the Most High have no reason to be anxious about whether they’ve been heard or not. But then, I digress.

The suspense from a suspended status report on WhatsApp can be quite discombobulating, particularly where a response is urgently required. This unwarranted anxiety is what users with a god complex put their collocutors through by turning off read receipts. They gleefully create the impression of a dialogue of the deaf, in which one is speaking and the other isn’t listening. It distorts and disrupts communication. Although there may eventually be a reply (feedback), meaning can hardly be exchanged when there is no indication that messages have been read. The interaction, therefore, becomes a dialogue of the deaf, which is anything but communication!

A fortnight ago, a viral video of Pastor Sarah Omakwu, who leads the Abuja-headquartered Family Worship Centre, sparked debate online where she criticised WhatsApp users who deactivate their blue tick read receipts. She observed that so many people disable the feature to avoid responding to messages, describing the act as lying.

According to the woman of God, “If you are hiding your read receipts on WhatsApp to avoid accountability, hear me: it is not wisdom, it is dishonesty dressed as privacy. God is raising people who are faithful in small things. If you can’t be honest in a chat, how will he trust you with people, with money, with influence? Start living in integrity; the small place is where he tests you for the big place. Turn it back on, be a person of your word.”

Methinks her deploring of this ghosting act on WhatsApp isn’t far-reaching enough. Deeper repulsive traits beyond insincerity and an aversion to probity can be gleaned from the deactivation of WhatsApp read receipts. People defend the practice as diplomacy, setting boundaries and standards, but it also comes across as bare-faced snobbery. Why would anyone wilfully create such an impression of themselves on people?

With Matthew 5:37 demanding that “Your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’, there should be no ambiguity about whether you’ve read a WhatsApp chat or not, for whatever is more than these is from the evil one. Allowing it to be registered that you’ve noted a chat, no matter how inconvenient, is the way of the saints. Even if not explicitly a sin, leaving the user who chatted you up out in the cold is an appearance of evil. This, 1 Thessalonians 5:22 admonishes believers to abstain from!

If not apropos, active read receipts wouldn’t have been the default setting of a virgin account. It is apparently to uphold rectitude and propriety that WhatsApp included the fair and firm condition: “If you turn off read receipts, you won’t be able to see read receipts from other people.” The same standard applies to the viewing of status. We shall get to that presently.

It is shocking that despite this proviso that draws from the principle of “do unto others as you’d want them to do unto you”, some users still turn off their blue-tick marker! What is incentivising this shadiness is inconceivable, yet it also reeks of cowardice. If you can’t stand some people and their overtures, why not intimate them of your ill disposition rather than shutting out everyone else?

Some users even hide the two blue check marks, not for any reasonable reason but because doing so appears fashionable or is a status symbol. This is given that disabling WhatsApp read receipts is the proclivity of higher-ups, movers and shakers, or users who consider themselves better than most. This perhaps explains why the trend seems fanciful and is not being condemned as it should.

Be that as it may, first impression – which has always been said to matter – is not only created at the initial physical meeting but has crept into the digital milieu as the signal someone gets after sending their earliest message to a new contact on WhatsApp. Even if a kahuna, the user with disabled blue ticks will, from the gates, come off as off, thereby triggering the alarm bells on their integrity quotient.

Now to the kindred spirit of stealthily viewing people’s WhatsApp updates as if on a digital espionage mission. That’s another despicable act dressed as privacy, because the motive is usually unrighteous, hideous, devious, and dubious. Out of arrogance, some people find ways to secretly keep up with the WhatsApp briefings of people they seem not to care about or they presume are beneath them.

Individuals who indulge in this self-deceit and supercilious behaviour need to get a life. Why don’t they devote their time and broadband to activities they can be proud of, rather than remaining bothered about who they have supposedly cancelled or are undeserving of their attention? Given that there are hacks that expose them, haters who hide to view their contacts’ updates on WhatsApp are only making a mockery of themselves.

Understandably, there may be altruistic reasons for viewing WhatsApp statuses anonymously, such as HR managers seeking to better understand their employees or the need for due diligence before entrusting a major responsibility or opportunity to someone. Vengeful users also put up the appearance to get at those who ignore their own posts. Who can count the number of relationships that have crumbled under the weight of pettiness around social media updates! What these egotistic and myopic characters fail to realise is that there are users like yours sincerely who are constrained from arbitrarily and habitually checking people’s online status. With that being the case, I have deep regard for good-intentioned contacts who transparently follow my posts on WhatsApp regardless.

In the final analysis, those who, out of spite, vindictiveness, and other vain considerations, steal to see the social media posts of their relations and acquaintances must realise that they are a few metres away from witchcraft street. Matthew 5:37 can also be adapted here in that the “Yes” of these monitoring spirits had better be “yes” and their “no”, “no”, because any other tendency towards their contacts’ WhatsApp updates is inspired by the evil one (read: the devil)!

VIS Ugochukwu is a Sage, Storyteller  and Branding Strategist who can be reached via nmiringwu@gmail.com