 |
| So many apps! |
I am titling this part one because there are a lot of things that fall into this category! When I am cycling or hiking, it is rain for instance. However, I am not here to talk about rain today. A while back, Rachel did a post about her screen time, and my comment was so long and I still had more to say, so I thought I would do a post about it as well.
I won't quote my own comment verbatim; you can go and read it if you want. However, here is the short of it. On the day of my comment I had 2 hours and 10 minutes of screen time. 31 mins of that was camera use, as I was at a UNESCO site and I took a lot of photos, 33 mins was YT, as I watched one video before going to bed, much of the other time was split between audiobooks and podcasts and 13 minutes was $%^&*# WhatsApp, which is what I want to talk about. I also had 59 notifications from WhatsApp that day, and spoiler alert, this is only from chats that I have not muted!
Many people have asked me how I meet people while traveling. Luckily there are a few ways; one is Meetup.com, which usually consists of a once a week organized meetup of some sort. The next one is FB groups; this can be expat groups or local hiking groups or general travel groups. But usually, each of these groups also has an associated WhatsApp group chat, and this is a very common way to organize meet ups.
In addition to the groups, many international people use WhatsApp to communicate, since it is free to send a "text" from one international number to another, which may not be the case with your regular text message platform. Also, many businesses use this, which is great because just like with the other travelers, this is free to communicate and makes it much easier to make a reservation or call a business if you need something.
So, it can be a good thing for sure. However, weeding through the chatter to get to the things that are actually important to me is not always easy. Most of the expat groups have a lot going on, such as questions like where to buy a dresser or find a hairdresser who speaks English, or where the party is tonight, and there are often chats 24/7, and videos of last night's shenanigans. I definitely keep these big groups muted, but I still have to check them from time to time to see if there is anything useful there.
Most of the time there will be a side chat for certain activities, but these can be a lot too! I joined a hiking side chat and in the 48 hours it was live there were 117 chats, including 234 photos and who knows how many likes and hearts and thumbs ups! That is 59 notifications a day right there!
Additionally, depending on where you are, there is also FB messenger communication; there is an app like WhatsApp called Telegram (there is also one called Signal) and there are even Slack group chats. If you want to know about expat events, you may also have to check Instagram, Facebook or a specific webpage to keep up. Of course if I want to try to get involved, I have to do a complete 180 from my normal style, which was to ignore everything, and now I either have to have things binging and buzzing all day long and/or I have to go in and check 17 different sites to find out what is happening.
Unfortunately, for travel, unless you want to sit in a vacuum by yourself, you have to check these apps and use them to communicate, but I hate it. I generally have all notifications off on my phone except for my regular text messenger and my Google chat, which is where my family communicates. Otherwise, I will go and check certain things a few times a week and respond as needed. However, now I kind of have to have more of them turned on or I could miss stuff, but I really don't like it. I still (stubbornly) keep a lot of the notifications off but then I have to either be sure to purposefully check or I sometimes miss things.
Did I also mention that any time you book a tour or any activity, there are several more WhatsApp notices with the same information that was already in the original email and then follow up chats about reviews (in addition to the ones in my email)? Sigh.
However, I do wonder why the US has not yet really adopted these channels, and when I had to get in touch with customer service to AMEX about a travel related issue (so, yes, I am not in the US), I had to make a real live phone call! So, I guess in the end, I would rather put up with the WhatsApp etc. than have to pay extra to make a simple phone call in the year 2025.
But wait, I am not done with this rant yet. Can I tell you how annoyed I get when people just text the word "hello" and then nothing else? Or when you text them with a very long explanation and/or question and they return text only one word or an answer to only one of the five questions you asked? Or instead of texting one paragraph, they text five separate texts with a sentence each, which means, you guessed it, you get five notifications! This seems to be very prevalent in Türkiye. I am not saying that there are not people in the US that do it; there are! However, just get to the point people!
 |
| Shopping for a new phone in France |
So what is the point of this rant? When you are traveling, you really can't live without a smartphone. I mean, you could, but life would be a lot harder. So as much as I try to ignore it, I need it. I really don't want to go back to paper maps and phone cards, and I am pretty happy with the fact that I can land in a new city and make connections so quickly, but sometimes I wish I could just turn the dang thing off for a long, long time.
P.S. I wrote the first part of this post back in April when Rachel wrote her original one, so I thought it would be fun to check again to see what my usage was yesterday.
Saturday June 7th:
Screen time: 2 hours, 2 mins.
Clock 20 mins (I used the timer)
AOL 19 mins (I decided to unsubscribe and archive a bunch of emails - this is an old email address with a lot of junk)
Goodreads 12 mins
FB 11 mins (travel groups)
Chrome 10 mins
Telegram 8 mins (travel group)
Notifications: 69. Mostly from:
Clock (not sure why)
Messages (texts)
WhatsApp
Chat
Unlocks: 22
Bottom line: it is not really much different than April!
Your turn! I have questions for you!
1. What are your phone stats (how many times do you unlock? How much screen time do you have in a day? How many notifications do you get per day)?
2. What is one app you cannot do without?
3. What app that you need/have to use most annoys you?
4. How do you feel about people who either do one word texts OR really long ones?
5. Which of the apps in the photo above do you use to communicate?
