I also have ASD and I actually have the complete opposite view! I don’t like it when people text me expecting me to reply instantly, because I don’t feel like text conversations have a well-defined start and end. That bothers me in a “unfinished business” way. As in, if I respond immediately, and then they respond immediately, and so on and so forth, when does it end? Nobody really says goodbye in instant messaging anymore. I appreciate people who understand that I’m going to take my sweet time to respond, especially because I don’t use my smartphone often anyway (as it’s very distracting and can be a huge time sink for me).

I like to let all my friends know that if something is important or they want an imminent response, they should just call me instead. That way I don’t have that feeling that “the ball is in my court” after the call ends, i.e. that I need to check my phone and respond to something before someone arbitrarily decides it’s been too long and gets upset with me.

I am a “zillennial” (born in the late 90s), and one of the things I miss about the early days of the internet with stuff like MSN is the focus on statuses (online, busy, offline) and how accurate they were. If someone were marked as online, you knew they were on the computer at that very moment and it’s not just whatever status they had set on their smartphone or whatever.