Sunday, August 01, 2010

The Death of the Phone Call

Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call | Magazine: "This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die."

5 comments:

J. Kingston Pierce said...

Baloney! What's happened is that people have simply put greater distance between themselves, come up with new communications techniques that don't require them to actually speak with each other or engage in communications requiring face-to-face contact. The result is likely to be more superficial interactions between people, increasing isolation, and unease in situations where people actually have to be in the same room, communicating with one another. I'm afraid we're raising a generation of misanthropes who will find it difficult to actually work with one another in the future.

Cheers,
Jeff

Nik Morton said...

Jeff may ring a bell there...

Stephen D. Rogers said...

Hey Bill,

Next thing you know, people will stop writing letters. That will be a sad day indeed.

Stephen

Benjie said...

Every so often, I sit down and "long-hand" a letter just to keep the art alive.

Richard R. said...

Jeff is right abut this.

Vocal expression apparently means nothing to this writer.

I have a land line. One page bill a month, $15 flat fee. If it rings, I either answer or let it roll to the machine. No sweat, no panic. There are only the old phone buttons, no full keyboard, to pictures, web etc. No Tweet, Face book, etc. going on here either. He may think the distancing is good, but most of the smart phone users I know feel COMPELLED to Tweet and text and read all their incoming text messages, their phones are in use an amazing amount of hours every day.