modern texting has basically created a new kind of social perception which is insanely fascinating.
i.e. after enough exposure you stop reading the literal words & start reading all of the deltas instead. those start to matter a lot more. stuff like response latency, even punctuation, message length, whether someone answers every part of a text, emoji usage, emoji tags, sudden changes in warmth, initiation frequency, when they stop asking questions, whether their cadence feels effortless or managed, etc.
the content becomes almost secondary. it’s remarkable how much human meta data flows through even a medium that mostly removes the non verbal stuff by default.
I like how, in MOBY-DICK, Melville describes the Pequod as being “tricked out in the chased bones of its enemies.” The ship becomes a simulacrum of what it hunts, a “cannibal of a craft,” half wood, half whale.