RSSHanging on the Telephone in the Age of IM
Dec 24
Life in Digital, Relationships cell phone, Facebook, Phone, Texting, twitter Comments Off
Communication these days is such a weird negotiating process. When you meet someone new, or just try to talk to your close friends, you have to figure out the best way to get ahold of them.
It’s no longer a simple thing to pick up the phone and dial a number and hope that someone answers on the other hand. They might (if they like you, if they hear the ringer, if the phone is charged) or they might not.
It’s no joke, there are literally dozens of options to choose from to contact someone, text message, AIM, gchat, blackberry IM, Skype, phone, twitter, e-mail, courier pigeon to name a few. And every single one of your friends, family and acquaintances, new and old, has their preferred method to be contacted.
Myself, for instance, I listen to all my queued phone messages at one time. If you call on Tuesday, I might not listen to your voicemail for weeks, by which time, I have another twenty voicemails to delete and fifty missed calls to wade through. Your ninety-second voicemail takes me 3 and half seconds to delete, and that’s about how much time you have to convince me to listen to it.
Even before cell phones, I always used my phone sparingly. If I didn’t pick up when you call, I didn’t want to talk to you to begin with. Phone communication was traditionally at my convenience, not yours. The coming of e-mail was a godsend. And I usually respond to e-mails and text messages within minutes of receiving them.
While philosophically, that hasn’t changed, not only are there way more options to contact me than just a straight up phone call, my phone on its own caters to, let’s see, well…almost all of them. From my phone, I can take calls, e-mails, text messages, twitter, facebook, gmail, yahoo. Short of courier pigeon and the US Postal Service, there is almost limitless coverage of every conceivable mode of contact.
Because of that, the rules go out the window when I’m catering to someone else’s preference. I have one friend who will respond faster to text message than any other medium. We almost never actually talk on the phone. When dude calls me up to chat, you better believe I pick up the phone. That’s something special.
Likewise, my father isn’t so much an e-mail guy (he’s not so much a phone guy either) which makes those phone calls special when they do come in, no matter how much I disdain using the phone myself.
It’s all about negotiating. There should be an implicit understanding that if you initiate the contact, you use the preferred medium of the person you are calling, texting, whatever. But in reality, it becomes a question of who wants it more, the person calling or the person being called.
It’s not all a wonderland to have this many options. It’s led to a lot of less personalized contact. I think bulk updates by e-mail to every person you’ve ever met are impersonal and insulting to everyone on your distribution list. But sending out a mass message through facebook or twitter makes sense because those are designed for that purpose. There is an implied invitation to read someone’s status update. And e-mail (and texting) by its nature is an exercise in passive aggressive obstructionist behavior. It requires finesse to not read too much or too little into an e-mail lacking any clues but what you know about the sender already and just the characters on the screen.
The net effect of all these options makes meeting new people and making connections with them even more impractical. Communication preference is an extra layer of idiosyncrasy that we didn’t need, and one that has begun to get in between individuals. Instead of bridging the gap, e-mail, texting, cell phones, facebook, twitter, it’s all widening the gap between yourself and people you haven’t met yet.
My friend met a boy who said “call me” and he meant it. He never responded to a single text message she sent. But in failing to acknowledge the text messages, all he is doing is making it harder for them to connect. This isn’t even a case of him making her do all the work. His preferred method of communication was talking on the phone, and he never failed to either answer or call her right back. But how do really you tell someone ‘we can’t go out if you’re going to insist on sending me text messages’? Look, people do all the time now. It is actually acceptable to freeze people out until they learn to communicate on your level.
Hey, I’m as guilty as anyone else. So either send me an e-mail now or wait until I’m damn well and ready to check my phone log and maybe I’ll get back to you sometime. It’s your call.
