Taking the "phone" out of "telephone"

[matril]

I've done plenty of ranting about cellphones before, but after reading an article about the increasing obsolescence of phones in general, my thoughts have been in a different direction. Turns out I'm not the only one who doesn't like talking on the phone - I've just felt guilty about it, and other people haven't.


The author of the article and most of the people whose opinions he sought all expressed their dislike of having to talk on the phone, so much that some of them won't even do it unless the phone call has been scheduled by email or texting. They also despise going through all the rigmarole of checking voicemail, so the messages generally go unheard. The only people who call regularly without appointment are nuisances like solicitors. Cellphones are for texting, playing games, checking email - anything but talking to people on it.

Well. I found all of this surprisingly maddening. Let me tell you a little about my lifelong dysfunctional relationship with telephones. I have always had trouble talking on them - something about hearing a voice without seeing the face just made it difficult for me. And if anything, noise or other distractions, is happening on my side, I can't focus on the phone call at all. I certainly can't do what my husband does, which is blithely carry on two conversations on and off the phone. When I was young, I never answered the phone. If I was the only one home, I let the answering machine get it, because after all a machine would take a far better message than distracted, nervous, stuttering me. If the phone call was actually for me, I would dread that horrible ordeal of having to talk on it. And heaven forbid having to make a phone call myself. What if I dialed the wrong number and had to deal with that embarrassment? What if the other person didn't want to talk on the phone? What if they weren't home and I had to leave an awkward message? Yeah.

It took my years to work on this. I'm still far from confident on the phone, but I have made considerable progress - I do in fact answer it, and I make phone calls without (usually) writhing in agonized anticipation of it. I worked hard on it. Why? Because as far as I could tell, everyone else used phones, and even seemed to enjoy talking on them. Teenagers and their huge phone bills, right? That was normal behavior, and mine was not. Mine was keeping me from being a functional human being.

So reading about people just casually hating phone calls, without doing anything to improve upon it - yeah, that makes me mad. And the voicemail thing drives me insane. I can't count how many times I've called someone, left a long, detailed message on their voicemail in spite of all my difficulties, and then had them never call back, or at best call me saying, "Hey, I noticed you called. What's going on?" without checking the message I took so much trouble to record. ARGH. We only just got voicemail ourselves, after years of using that antiquated device called an answering machine - and now, apparently, voicemail is almost obsolete as well. Sheesh.

Calling people, it seems, has become more of a game of tag, without any specific meaning in the calls. I called you, now it's your turn. And then, of course, we come to texting. I thought there was already a method of sending text messages long distance. It was called the telegraph. Then the telephone came along and improved upon that, supposedly. Except now we're admitting we never really wanted to talk to anyone - we just wanted a faster, easier way of exchanging text. Hey, I like email; I've always preferred it to phone calls because I can take the time to consider my message and remove any errors that show up in raw speech. But texting....I don't know. Not to get all melodramatic or something, but it feels like taking too many steps back from human contact. Human contact is messy. And I kind of think it's good for us. Yes, this is coming from me, the introvert/hermit with serious social anxieties. If I can exert myself to go out in public and interact with grumpy strangers at the grocery store, then other people should too, darn it! And they shouldn't be afraid of telephones.

(Incidentally, in my science fiction dystopia, though the main technology has to do with genetics, I do touch on this trend and try to extrapolate on what sort of long-distance communication would be most fitting. And it's all text, no transmitted speech at all. It kind of serves as a nice metaphor for the isolation inherent to the society, that even as a neatly-ordered City of thousands of people, there's no real sense of connection or community.)

But I know when I start doomsaying like this, I'm trying to fight a tidal wave. Texting obviously taps into something powerful, considering how fast it's spread. Trends will come and go. Maybe the telephone has seen its heyday. I just never thought I, of all people, would be the one to regret its passing.

Comments

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I'm all right on the phone now, but that's only because I took a right-out-of-college job of desperation as an assistant to insurance adjusters, and 99% of my time had to be spent talking on the phone. It got to the point where I didn't think anything of it (though I had to be careful at home not to answer my own phone with the name of the company). I think a big part of fear of the phone is just that it's very counter-instinctual to be talking to someone and yet not be able to see their body language or what sort of context they're in. It's also much easier to miss words. So emailing/texting does have it over the phone in that we can be sure what the words are and since there's no dead air like on the phone - we're not on the spot to answer *right away* -- even texting, you can break for a minute, can't you? I don't like texting myself (the horrible abbreviations OH MY GOD I AM SO OLD) but in its own weird way it seems like a revival of the early British postal system where you had three or four deliveries a day and if you read people's collected letters you'll find lots of notes flying back and forth about whether they should have tea together that day or whether to attend the show tonight or tomorrow.

It's funny, because with emails/letters/texts you can't see body language either, but somehow the phone emphasizes the lack more. I wouldn't be too sorry to see writing come back to dominate over the phone (or since people often do it on their phone, I should say the speaking part of the phone) but the speaking phone itself should survive - there's nothing like hearing certain people's voices, after all.

[matril.livejournal.com]

Most of my trial-by-fire phone acclimation occurred when we were trying to get a diagnosis for Luke and then went through the subsequent red tape of getting him into schools and specialized programs. I had to talk on the phone and make dozens of phone calls, or my son wasn't going to get the help he needed. I still hated it, but I had the urgent motivation to ignore that hate. ;)

I admit that most of my aversion to texting stems from two things - my general dislike of cellphones (they've just become so necessary, and I hate it when frivolous things become necessary), and the ridiculous abbreviations (yes, I am a crochety 80-year-old). I'm a firm believer in the natural evolution of language and all, but some young people - seriously, their writing is atrocious and incomprehensible, and texting only encourages their...er "creative" use of written language. That's not natural; it's just sloppy. And now I'm off to wave my cane at those upstart whippersnappers trespassing on my yard. :P

[melitusj.livejournal.com]

Textspeak encourages banality. It's less the brevity than the insipidity.