Beloved amateur video essayist Tony Zhou earned knowing nods across the internet when he observed in a 2014 video that “in the last four or five years, something’s happened: Filmmakers have started adopting a new formal convention, the on-screen text message.” At the time, shows like Sherlock and House of Cards were relatively new, and the way they depicted texting, shunning the zoom-in onto a phone screen in favor of overlaying words directly onto the picture, felt groundbreaking. https://compote.slate.com/images/697b023b-64a5-49a0-8059-27b963453fb1.gif?crop=780%2C520%2Cx0%2Cy0&width=840.