Don't Call Me Please, I'll Facebook You
It's an exaggeration, of course. We will still make millions of telephone calls on both mobile and fixed lines every day. Depending on our line of work we might make dozens in a day. Journalists in particular develop a deformity of the neck from holding a receiver to their ear with a permanent shrug of the shoulder. When there's a leadership spill on in Canberra the numbers men work the phones, not Facebook, or Twitter or IM.
A disabled Sri Lankan army soldier tries to make a call from his mobile phone at Ranaviru Sevena hospice, a home for disabled soldiers in Ragama, on the outskirts of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Wednesday, May 12, 2010. Sri Lankan government has announced a week to honor the soldiers and a victory parade in capital, Colombo on May. 20.But increasingly we do have options other than a phone call and increasingly we're finding them way more convenient and attractive. Or cheaper, of course, in the case of Skype. Sometimes it's related to the nature of social media which has made our friendship networks much wider but shallower. There are people with whom I'll happily chat or exchange messages on Facebook but would never call on the phone.
Even for those friends we first find online who are interesting and persistent enough to become real world besties, it's probably more common to maintain contact via some form of electronic messaging rather than phone calls. Giving your phone number to somebody you've met online is something of a gold standard in establishing a base level of trust.
Fact is, most communication can probably be dealt with in a couple of lines of text, and as our lives become more complex and accelerated we are less inclined to invest long stretches of time in building and maintaining relationships through the medium of empty chatter.
At least on the phone. After all, why lose half an hour gossiping with one person on the blower, when in the same time you could manage equally pointless but possibly witty conversations with dozens on a service like Twitter.
It's not all upside, however. For example, I find increasingly when dealing with younger journalists and researchers who contact me for interviews that they much prefer to send questions via e-mail and have me reply in text. And why wouldn't they? It saves them the unpleasant job of transcribing a conversation. That task gets shifted to the interviewee.
They can just cut-and-paste from whatever you write in reply directly into the finished copy. (I was getting to the point of really beginning to resent this development until I was forced into using dictation software by last year's busted wing and realised I could knock over e-mail questions as quickly, if not more quickly, than I could an old-fashioned phoner.)
All of the stats are trending away from phone calls, with smartphones in particular being blamed for the shift. We now use them to exchange data much more than we do to voice call each other.
It's possibly even the case that we've begun to resent and anticipate the worst when the phone rings, given the chance we'll now pick it up to find a telemarketer, or a Robocaller, a charity mugger or some interfering bureaucrat on the other end.
So I'm kind of curious. As a little experiment, just have a think about how often you used the phone 10 or even five years ago, and the sorts of things for which you used it. And think about your phone now. Particularly your landline. Is it still getting the same sort of lovin'?
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