Abstract
Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting From the Ancient to the Instant World investigates the relationship between waiting, media, and communication. Waiting is a phenomenon that has been largely underscrutinized in media studies, and the goal of this book is to acknowledge moments in history where “waiting for a message was central to the message itself” (p. 1). In an age of constant connectivity facilitated by smartphones and 5G mobile networks, waiting has acquired a certain nostalgia for some scholars and has become a venture that one might choose to pursue. For example, Robert Hassan (2019) actively sought to experience long periods of waiting without digital distraction during a 5-week digital detox on a container ship across the Pacific Ocean. In contrast, Delayed Response does not simply advocate for waiting but seeks to understand it more broadly in relation to communication. Farman notes that waiting can be disempowering and is often imposed on the vulnerable, such as those forced to wait in welfare queues for hours. Instead, he wants researchers to pay more attention to the medium of waiting so we can see how it opens up different understandings of society.
The book is loosely structured around variegated historical, technological, and cultural case studies of waiting. In Chapters 1 and 5, Farman explores the multifaceted meaning of waiting during natural disasters and war. Following the 2011 earthquakes in Japan, people anxiously waited to hear from their loved ones in affected areas, due in part to the Japanese government delaying certain channels to avoid overloading the bandwidth. Similarly, “delay was . . . an organising fact of life during the [American] Civil War” (p. 123), with communications across bridges managed to ensure strategic messages reached senior officers.
Chapters 2 and 3 look more closely at the influence of infrastructure and design on waiting. Media historians will be interested in the emergence of the pneumatic tube network in major European and American cities in the late 19th century, and the contemporaneous belief that it would eliminate waiting for messages. One of the convincing claims of Delayed Response is that waiting is not likely to be ever fully abolished by technology, as delays are often a by-product of the material limits of communication infrastructure. Another noteworthy insight is the increasing use of design and technology to manage people’s experiences of waiting. In Chapter 3, Farman describes buffering icons on screen interfaces as a notable example of the way technology is utilized to placate impatient users. Mobile media scholars may also be interested in Chapter 6 and the use of wax marked seals on letters. Similar to the read receipt functionality on smartphone messaging applications, the marked seal implicated both the sender and recipient’s experience of waiting by conferring authorship to the former, and the possibility to verify the content to the latter.
However, a lack of signposting throughout the book makes it difficult to discern how each individual chapter contributes to the book’s overall thesis. Farman details each case study at length, drawing upon a mix of interviews, archival research, and his own experience of waiting. Less attention is paid to how each case study contributes towards or subverts normative conceptions of time and waiting. The writing is also more descriptive than analytical, meaning the reader is often left to draw their own conclusions. More detailed discussion about the attempts to commodify and control waiting in the context of mail scheduling apps such as Boomerang, or trends such as slow food, slow fashion, and slow media would have been welcome to more effectively address the economic and social appeal of waiting. As it stands, these issues only get cursory attention. Perhaps the major takeaway from Delayed Response is that the communicative aspects of waiting are amorphous and difficult to generalize.