The initialism “BRB” might refer to many things: the British Railways Board, the Banco de Brasilia, the Belorussian currency. One thing it increasingly does not indicate is the practice of leaving one’s computer and coming “right back.”
According to Google Trends, U.S. searches of the term “brb” have fallen steadily from their all-time high in 2010. At the same time, global smartphone sales have more than quadrupled, according to the IT research firm Gartner — from a mere 81 million phones sold in the third quarter of 2010 to a whopping 330 million sold last quarter.
The Internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme traces the earliest recorded use of “brb” back to a chat session in 1989, when users with screen names like “THE GIBBER” and “Deadhead13” stepped away from their blocky, 8-bit Apple IIs for a little offline time.
In those early days, you couldn’t easily tell whose turn it was to type, let alone whether your conversation partner was paying attention. An extended silence from Deadhead13 could mean he got up to get a drink or you just offended him.
Faced with those kinds of quandaries, chatters developed their own code of status indicators. An away message meant you weren’t at your computer. “Discourse markers” like “mmmm” or an ellipsis meant you were there, but pondering what to say. And “brb” — along with its lesser cousin, “away from keyboard” or “afk” — became shorthand for a brief and foreseeable stepping-away.
But thanks to the rise of the smartphone, being away from one’s keyboard is no longer an excuse for not answering a text.
Repeated studies have shown that we feel pressure to carry our phones everywhere: into our beds and our bathrooms, on our coffee “breaks” and to our family dinners.
According to Gallup, 11 percent of all adults say they check their smartphone every “few minutes.” The figure doubles when you zoom in on the under-30 set.
Scholars have begun to study “nomophobia,” which is a fear of not being able to check one’s phone constantly. Yet, when someone launched an app to address nomophobia in 2013, it sputtered out within mere weeks.
The app, which let users post mobile away messages to their networks, was appropriately called BRB.
