Whatsapp: Digital Genre Profile

ENG 101 HUOQ
7 March 2017

The Easiest Way To Say “What’s Up?”

Seven continents, one hundred ninety-five countries, sixty-five hundred languages, over seven billion people. Technology helps us to stay in touch, but when it comes to exchanging instant messages, there is a bump. It looks like there are too many choices to choose from, but each of them comes with a complication. Facebook messenger could be a great option, except that it is mandatory to create a profile on the Facebook platform to have an access to the messenger. Text messaging is great, but often is inaccessible when traveling out of country, or texting out-of-country recipients. Email can become unwieldy and is not a great option for real-time messaging. Skype works very well for long-distance phone calls, but less so for sending a quick text from a store or on the subway.

Yet there is one application that was created to avoid those issues. It is called WhatsApp. Online sources say that WhatsApp has been around for eight years, since January 2009. The name was created to sound like the phrase What’s up? with a clever way of changing “up” for “app.” It was a free application at first, but developers had to change it to a paid service to avoid it growing too fast. The cost of it is $1 and that dollar mostly offsets the fee for sending a verification text, when the application is first downloaded and needs to be activated on a phone.

What makes this application so popular that in February last year it had over a billion users with tens of billion messages exchanged daily? Probably, the number one reason is accessibility and low cost. At the end of last decade, each phone plan came with a limited amount of text messages, and each text message sent overseas was charged at about $1. The choices were to either pay for each international text message separately, or to add international service on top of a regular phone plan. It was really expensive to stay in touch with foreign friends. On the other hand, there is no additional cost with WhatsApp once it is downloaded. The user simply must have a smartphone and a data plan. In case they are using WhatsApp at home or at school, there is always an option of wi-fi, and that helps to preserve precious megabytes off of a service plan.

Ultimately, WhatsApp is as easy to use as text messaging. Additional perks are being able to make a phone or a video call with a push of a button, and record short voice messages. This feature is exceptionally useful, if, let’s say, one of the users can’t text at the moment, or if a message is too lengthy to type. And when it comes to lengthy messages, they arrive in full, not broken into separate pieces. Also, each message comes with two verifications, with one check mark for a message delivered to the recipient, and two check marks for a message delivered and seen by the recipient. This isn’t an option for people exchanging regular text messages on two different platforms, Apple and Android. With regular texting, iPhone users can set up their phones to display “read” stamp to their counterpart, but Android users don’t have such luxury.