Hello, I am the developer of this messenger application.
I am a software engineer in Japan, and on my days off, I develop services as a hobby, etc.
Suddenly, I am not good at making phone calls.
I am also not good at frequent text messaging on messengers such as WhatApp.
When I receive a message from a friend or acquaintance, I feel obliged to return the message as soon as possible, and when I send a message to someone and he/she does not reply for a long time, I sometimes worry that I may have said something wrong.
Although technology has made communication much easier than it used to be, I sometimes think we need to consider the downside of this.
Sometimes I pass other residents in my apartment building.
We are not friends and I don't even know their names, but when we meet, we say a light greeting.
At that time, I felt at ease with that and began to think that communication with others could be as simple as this.
Of course, we need to communicate more closely with our close friends and partners, but I still think that we have come to overlook something important as a result of the ease with which we can communicate with each other via smartphones.
Ever open your smartphone and see a red dot of unread messages and think it's a distraction?
That thing is the most evil of the great inventions of this century.
Why do Facebook, Instagram, and many other apps like WhatsApp display a red dot on the screen?
Humans are designed to pay attention to a red dot when it appears in their field of vision, and the software we use these days, messengers, understand human cognition and display it intentionally to gain attention.
For example, if I belong to a school or work community, and I am a member of that community's messenger group, I may have received a lot of notifications of messages that have nothing to do with me, and I may have considered them disturbing.
Even if you find it disturbing, you probably cannot leave that messenger group.
If you do, others will be suspicious that you left the group and will ask you questions at a later date with worried looks on their faces.
I also wondered if I needed to keep a history of my messages.
Sometimes leaving a message history can make you overly concerned about that person.
This is natural psychology, but it is no small pressure for me to feel that I need to send a message to that person as soon as possible.
In the case of important business messages, I have to make sure I don't miss a message from the other person, and it is important that the history is kept, so existing messenger applications such as WhatsApp are very effective for that use case.
However, when asked if red dots and message history are necessary for daily conversations with friends, family, lovers, and other private and connected people, I do not think it is necessarily an important factor, and in fact, I think it creates unnecessary pressure that we do not need to feel I have come to think that it is.
Do you ever get a bad feeling when you look at Instagram, Tiktok, or Twitter?
It is very natural to feel a little negative when you see hate speech, or when you see pictures of your good friends having a good time, or when you see a very good-looking person with a large number of followers. There has already been a lot of research on the negative effects of social media on mental health.
Also, and this is my own reflection, when I see a news article, I often only see the headline and do not check the details.
Technology has made our lives much more convenient, but it has also changed the way people interact with information, and information is now consumed at high speed and in large quantities.
Social media can be very useful and interesting, but it is advisable to use it with an understanding of both the positive and negative aspects it creates.
It is already happening in many places where we find ourselves consuming so much information that it eventually influences our own thoughts and beliefs.
It is natural for our thoughts to change depending on our surroundings and the environment we encounter, but the big problem with social media is that a large amount of information can influence our thinking and mentality in ways we do not intend, and we are not even aware of it.
Social apps like Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, etc. can also be very disturbing to me at times, as well as messenger apps like WhatsApp.
This is a familiar sound to Japanese speakers.
Wissu, or Ossu, or whatever you want to call it, this pronunciation has a lot of context, depending on the case.
Communication via software has evolved too much. We should be able to do it rougher and slower.
This app allows you to send a message to the other person.
You cannot do anything else.
All message communication is done via push notifications, there is no history of messages, and no data is stored on the server in the first place.
There is no on-screen indication of when a message was sent.
It is dedicated to sending text.
By doing this, we aim to make it easy for people to send messages to those they want to send them to, for the recipients to feel like they can reply when they want to, and for people to free up their brains by slowing down the amount and speed at which they consume information, which has risen dramatically with the development of technology.
There is no need to feel sorry that you haven't replied, or sad that you haven't received a reply from the other person.
The important communication can be done when you meet in real life.
This app was developed by me, who became a software engineer after having benefited from the evolution of technology in one way or another and yearning for it, and I am not a fan of phone calls or chats.
If you have ever used social media or messenger apps and suddenly found your mind tired, please install the app.