The Death of the Telephone Call
1876–2007.
The phone call died, according to Nielsen, in the autumn of 2007. During the final three months of that year the average monthly number of texts sent on mobile phones (218) exceeded, for the first time in recorded history, the average monthly number of phone calls (213).
.. text messages are five times more frequenton mobile phones than phone calls.
.. You can still call your best friend on the telephone, but he probably won’t pick up. Instead he’ll text you, or ping you on Facebook, and wonder when the hell it was you became so emotionally needy.
.. I make exceptions to the naked rule now and then, but always with trepidation, because when a friend you’ve never seen naked sees your name pop up on his smartphone he’s liable to think you lack boundaries.
.. If you know somebody pretty well in the business sense (the threshold here being not “have I seen this person naked?” but “have I ever seen this person across a lunch table?”) you may phone with some confidence that the party will pick up. If not, you’ll have to leave a message and enter a ghastly limbo that requires a formal appointment. To talk on the phone!
.. The telephone’s rule was absolute until the mid-1980s, when the rising popularity of answering machines and caller ID began to undermine it.
.. Sometime around 2010, my then-teenage daughter was trying to call a friend. Something’s wrong, she said. This phone has gone berserk. She handed it to me. I listened, then explained patiently what a busy signal was. She’d never heard one before.
.. Texting is a good medium for flirtation, a transaction typically between two people who don’t know each other very well. But it’s a poor medium to express love in its more mature forms—romantic, familial, or platonic
.. Perhaps a hardy band of artisans in Brooklyn or Venice, California, will revive the telephone call as a boutique ritual, much as they’ve revived the playing of vinyl records on turntables.