How I met my friend, M-M (Modern Message-in-a-Bottle)

     You wake up to find another inbox full of mails. Your phone is full of alarms from Facebook, Kakao Talk, and other apps, which turns out as a mixture of work and hobbies. After taking shower you find more alarms have arrived, but only to find repetitive and irrelevant notices. Probably having missed some important messages, you are frustrated by some trivial and unnecessary alarms messing your phone.

     You get to work, find some missed messages via some conversations, reply to them. You send few more messages notifying important information to those who haven't checked your previous notification. You find inbox exploding once more, frustrated by those who send irrelevant messages and those who do not check important posts you have been notifying everyone about. Soon worn out, you are exhausted from the endless relay of human interaction.

     This was not the way how communication worked in the past. They were slowed down by practical barriers; long distances and illiteracy were the biggest reasons for the delay in delivering information. None of such problems occurred - until Meucci or Bell invented the phone, and Zuckerberg invented Facebook, starting the era of instant exchange.

     You have a notification by App Store. Interested in the new recommendation, you go in to find an app named 'Slowly'. Desiring to change the problem of instant messaging, where writing loses its value more than it deserves, this app delivers the mail to your pen pal after a certain amount of time passes, depending on the sender and receiver's locations. Instead of noisy apps that rings your phone every second, you have a feeling this would be the app you wanted to have.

The Guinness World Record for world's oldest message-in-a-bottle.

      You are reminded of an article you have recently read. Une bouteille à la mer est retrouvée 108 ans plus tard sur une plage de la mer du Nord, or A bottle at the sea is found 108 years later on a beach of the North Sea. The letter was found to have been sent by George Parker Bidder in the early 1900s, in the purpose of studying marine currents. His purpose was related to study, but many others were inspired by his actions, imitating him. In Finland, one retired fisherman sent more than 4,000 bottles of letters and received letters in a high ratio. You were tempted to try if it could be done online. Here you find your chance, you don't hesitate.

     Soon you follow the instructions given by the app, successfully possessing a personal account. A few days later, you receive a message from a total stranger. With some more exchanges taking more than a week to complete, you find someone with similar interest.

     So that's pretty much about how you met Mitrel, your pen friend. You have tried to understand why and how you could get so close to her, despite that you have never seen her.

     It comes to your mind that the difference may be that you spend more time writing through a mail app that takes hours to deliver. Thinking that time may be the variable to this problem, you spend more time writing announcements. Taking time to reconsider every word choice and to improve the delivery of the main points.

     As you feel pride in the improved version of writing, no one seems to notice the rise in the writing's quality. You find that people still don't read the notices. You realize the problem is instead the flooding amount of notices, pushing important alerts out of the way and busying users with insignificant alerts. And you recognize yourself slowly joining the march of those who have disconnected themselves from social medias.