The notification, considered as a sentence, the gist

The notification, considered as a sentence

The daily astrology message that lands on your phone is a short sentence built to a fixed pattern, finished before the morning it talks about, and the pattern leaves no room for the words "it depends".

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

The sentence is often inside the app before it has anything to do with you. Apple's manual for developers describes a way of sending notifications in which the wording is stored in advance with gaps left in it, and a server drops the planet and the sign into the gaps at the last second. The part that is about you is the smallest part of the sentence, and the part chosen last.

A push notification is a short message an app puts on your phone screen without you opening it. Astrology apps send one most mornings.

Set a few of them side by side and the same three things turn up every time. You are inside the sentence, either as the word "your" or by the name of your sign. The time is now, or a few hours away. And the sentence ends with one instruction: send this, keep that for later, finish the half-finished thing.

There is a fourth thing they share, and it is a missing thing. None of them carries a condition. No "if", no "unless", no "as far as anyone can tell".

That is not carelessness by the people who write them. On an iPhone a notification is an object with named boxes to fill in: a title, a subtitle, a message, and settings for sound and for how loudly it is allowed to interrupt you. There is plenty of room in the message itself, a few hundred words. The limit that really binds is a lock screen you look at for a second.

The hour is a setting too. A daily message is scheduled, which means it is not a reply to anything you did, and nothing you do stops it. One of the platforms companies use for this even sells a feature that guesses the best hour for each person. Morning suits the sentence because morning is close to the last moment at which the whole of it is still ahead of the reader. Sent at nine at night, the same words would read as a report, and a report can be checked against the day.

The instruction is the part that cannot be softened. Attach conditions to an order and the reader has to weigh them up, which takes longer than a glance, so the conditions are the first thing to go. Careful astrology is mostly conditions: whether the birth time is good enough, which starting point for the zodiac the software used, what the method being applied declines to say.

Words decoded

push notification: a short message an app puts on your phone screen without you opening the app
lock screen: the first screen you see when you pick up a phone, where notifications appear
payload: the small parcel of data a server sends to a phone to make a notification appear
placeholder: a gap left in a stored sentence, filled in later with a name, a planet or a sign
imperative: the form of a verb that gives an order: "send", "wait", "keep it short"
condition: the part of a sentence that says when the rest of it applies, usually starting with "if"
scheduled message: one set to go out at a fixed time, rather than in reply to something the reader did
rashi (राशि): one of the twelve zodiac signs used in Indian astrology
Meena (मीन): the sign Pisces
panchang (पञ्चाङ्ग): the Indian daily almanac, a table of what the sky is doing today, worked out for one named city
App Store review guidelines: Apple's published rules for what an app may and may not do

Why anyone should careA sentence that arrives every morning, in your own name, with one thing to do in it, is a strong piece of writing, and its strength comes from what the form made it leave out. Knowing which parts those are costs nothing, changes nothing on your phone, and leaves you free to keep the message if you like it.

Read it properly, 8 min The notification, considered as a sentence