8 reasons to call rather than text
- Many of us have a more intimate relationship with our devices than we have with our old friends, our colleagues, and most members of our immediate family. We are more intimately attached to our devices, fonder of them, responsive to them, and attuned to every nuance of their tiny, soulless selves than we are to, say, our first cousins. This is not a trend that will lead towards mental health and a lively old age.
- I have a severe allergic reaction to seeing people using electronic devices at meals. It’s like being allergic to nuts. Actually, as far as I’m concerned, it is being allergic to nuts. I’ve seen large groups sitting around a table at a nice restaurant where every family member, age 7 to 70, is holding a square piece of plastic, eyes down, thumbs going like mad (okay, Grandpa might be using a stylus) and saying, in terms of spoken language, exactly nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. It’s unnerving, right? If you’re at a table nearby, you find yourself speaking in low voices because the group almost appears lost in prayer, heads bowed as if their devices were hymnals.
- Our voices are singular. When you miss a person, don’t you miss not only hearing from them but hearing their voice? Don’t you wish you could hear them telling their favorite stories, or offering their unique perspectives, or listening with their own brand of attentive silence?
- We look up information we should know and now rely on a kind of technological exoskeleton to keep us upright rather than strengthening the core of our knowledge. As we overmedicate ourselves and becomes less physically resilient, so we become less intellectually resilient when we over-device ourselves. When we rely on a computer to remember the name of that actor from that movie, we miss out on the glorious feeling when we retrieve it on our own. Here’s how George Eliot described it: “That action of memory… had suddenly completed itself without conscious effort—a common experience, agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no value.”
5. Your fully-fledged inner self is more likely to be heard through the nuances, pauses, and intonations of your speaking voice than through the quick taps of your thumbs and index fingers (okay, so some people use their whole hands, but you get the point). On the phone, you can hear whether someone is paying attention, getting impatient, losing the thread of the story, or having a meaningful sexual encounter while you’re talking about something that matters to you. That can lead to an important, or intriguing, level of understanding.
6. In order to make a date to set up a phone call, you now are meant to get in touch beforehand to guarantee the date and time will be of mutual convenience? This involves some kind of initial approach by text or email? I’m still learning to adapt to this new protocol. With long-terms friends and less judgmental family members, I will accept the gamble, risking the severe consequence that I might get sent to voicemail if they don’t pick up. Only in high school did I repeatedly call because I was heartbroken when someone (usually A Cute Boy) did not answer the phone. In adult life, once I learned that this tactic of repeated redialing didn’t work with editors either, I developed useful coping mechanisms.
7. You might make somebody’s day by letting them hear your voice. Isn’t that a great way to enhance your own day—making yourself feel connected, valuable, and part of a community? How much easier could it be? (If your immediate and intuitive reply is that it would be even easier to send a message, I’d love to know what it is about making your own voice heard that unnerves you? Yes, yes, it’s true that a message could be welcome and might have a similar effect of conveying your good wishes, but you know that an authentic conversation in real time triggers all kinds of emotional, psychological, and even physiological responses that seeing words on screen do not? Sure you do.)
8. It’s easier to tell whether the person you’re in conversation with is really okay or is not okay by listening carefully to their voice as well as their words. We need to take care of one another.