Email today is now less a communications medium than a communications compile target. It’s a clearinghouse technology. It’s where conversations-of-record go, where identity verification happens, where service alerts accumulate, and perhaps most importantly for publishers, where push-delivered longform content goes by default. It is distributed and federated, near universal, and is not monopolized by a single provider.
– A Text Renaissance
The move to messaging is a pity precisely because we assume everyday chats are not ‘conversations of record’. I can easily look up conversations I had ten, fifteen years ago not only because they took place over email but also because Google Talk conversations too became their own (read-only) threads in Gmail. Conversations that are merely a year old are hard to look up because search in messaging apps isn’t as good as with even the most common email apps.
As for archiving your conversations in an open data format – Whatsapp and Telegram have text export, but it is an entirely manual process, to be done chat-by-chat, with no way of exporting a date range. For iMessage, well – this thread says it all:
First, make an iTunes backup, then find your iTunes backup folder: macOS~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/Windows%appdata%/Roaming/Apple Computer/MobileSync/BackupThere will be one randomly named folder, except you have backed up more devices with iTunes. In that folder, there is database file with your messages. You can open it using free SQLite database viewer and/or export the contents to CSV file format.
I’m not sure what export is like with Google’s existing chat apps, or others like Slack.
The message is clear – chat, where the vast majority of today’s conversations take place, is meant to be ephemeral. With a contact, we share pictures, break personal news, make confessions, share witticisms and inside jokes. The sum of all of that is our relationship with that contact. Today’s banalities are tomorrow’s memories.
We live in a time today where that relationship can be archived and searched through, where we can go back to them and delight and sober ourselves, unlike any time and era before us, and we unknowingly let that opportunity pass.