Month: July 2018

the sad state of my Instant Messenger accounts

I mostly use SMS, Slack and KakaoTalk for my daily messaging. Colleagues use Slack; us-based contacts use SMS and I get them via Hangouts, but for the past 4 years I haven’t been able to figure out how to set Hangouts (instead of Android’s built-in “Messages” app) as the default program for outgoing SMS, so I can’t integrate it with my address book or recent calls log. (I prefer Hangouts because I can type from the computer as well) Unless I’m responding to a recent incoming convo, to initiate an SMS convo I need to scroll through all my chat history to find the thread that belongs to the person or group, or manually type the number. I have no idea why sometimes some messages would be receives by Messages instead of Hangouts. Remaining Korean contacts are on KakoTalk.

I then have:

• A WeChat account made because a friend was traveling through China. I have 2 contacts on the app.
• A WhatsApp account made because most of the people I contacted to practice the language only had a WhatsApp account (which reveals your cell phone number.. what he heck?)
• A Telegram account made for the sole purpose of participating in a hobby-related group notification list. I have no contacts in the account (My contacts from 5 years ago seem to not have been reestablished when I refused to share my address book)
• A Signal account made for the sole purpose of talking with one person for work
• I never agreed to make a Facebook Messenger account, but Facebook made one anyway and someone kept messaging me time-sensitive stuff through the Messenger account

I can’t delete any of these accounts because they do have a marginal use case, and they sit on the phone consuming data, storage and RAM.

Excellent.

So I keep hearing about this mythical “reasonable and afraid” crowd who we can establish reasonable conversations with.

Let’s see:

• I see how the Korean media covers their activities and their positions, and I want to throw up. It’s disgusting.
• I go to their website, and I want to puke. It’s worse in online spaces.
• Same with their flyers.

Look, if we were leading a movement and a sympathetic media outlet was posting racist shit, we would condemn it and talk with the business in question so they would immediately stop the hate speech. If the media outlet refuses to collaborate, we would publicly announce that we do not consider them our allies.

Have the antis done that? If so what hopes do we have of establishing reasonable conversations with these people?