The telephone used to be the biggest invention in personal communication, but how many phone calls do owners of a smart phone actually make?
Email took ten years to replace most business phone calls; whatsapp, skype, hangouts and other chat software are doing the same for personal communication.
Phone phobia is a plague for businesses who expect their employees to actually call customers. Private phone calls are usually short and a ringing phone showing an unknown number scares people sufficiently to breed sites where you can look up those strange numbers.
Phone phobia is the latest social anxiety disorder and it's a quite common one considering the search term returns over 4 million hits.
Steve Jobs solidly believed in old metaphors s so his first smart phone was full of images of leather agendas, kitchen clocks and binders but did he realize that the very name of his smart phone would be obsolete within ten years?
A smart phone is everything but an iPhone; iMobile would have been the forward looking choice. How many phone calls do you still make?
And follow up questions:
a) if you're older than thirty: are they as long as they used to be?
b) if younger: can you imagine your parents calling for hours a day?
For both groups: do you look forward to a phone call or is it something you postpone or evade by using other media? #Tech
Too many.. my quota for September i allready done.
business or personal +Ole Jørgen Nordhagen and is too many 1 😉
I wanted a mobile phone to be reachable in some way. But now I only use it to stay connected to the internet.
Still, I'm glad when it's there. Sometimes it's nicer to hear someone's voice. (Skype works for this too, but not everyone in my family has it installed on their phones.)
Way fewer than I used to make. Count me in the phone phobia column. 99% work related. So not always shorter.
I have always disliked using phones. In my new job I have to use them far too often.
I am sure that I spent less than 30 minutes per month on the phone until recently.
I have never liked phone calls. For the simple reason that the assumption is you only exist and you are not doing anything other than waiting to answer the phone whenever it deems to ring.
Asych comms works much better and carries less expectation of immediate response.
So people using alternatives is actually more "normal" than dropping everything because some machine starts wailing.
I will do anything to avoid using the phone to call someone today. I used to talk virtually all day on the phone. But in 2001, I put a message on my phone messaging system: Here is my email address. Email me. Recently I started texting in self-defense. But I put my iPhone on all day "away" status and only let favorites ring through. That's family, my mechanic, barber, and a couple of friends.
yes, I till talk more than 30 minutes on the phone to my parents (I'm in the over 30 section though);
my "mobile" though is only for emergency calls – no internet possible on it either…….
Today was in a conference call for 2 hours with 6 people. I didn't remember how inefficient and tiresome this is. Phone is a waste of time imo. except maybe for first contact or very delicate subjects.
The async advantage of email +dawn ahukanna is often lost by using chat and hangouts, even for business purposes.
From my work in telecom I can submit that more than 90% of all calls lasts less than one minute.
These days, I only make personal phone calls for when I need to ask somebody a question or tell them something at that moment. If I'm standing in the beverage aisle at the grocery store and can't remember if my girlfriend wanted Dr. Pepper or Coke, it's quicker to call. If we're discussing what we should have for dinner later, text is the way to go. A phone call interrupts you in the moment, so I reserve them for urgent things. If it can wait, or it's more than a quick question, I always text.
phone calls are still part of my daily business, even though the total number of calls per day abated to app. 5 to 10 during the office hours.
email only replaced snail mail, but services like skype or g+ ho replaced a lot of phone calls and even business trips.
Ah, facts to support this discussion. Thanks +Per Siden
Before I switched to Straight Talk, I had a 400 or 450 minute plan from Sprint. I never used more than 100 minutes in a month. Usually less than 50.
+Marc Roelofs I have to disagree about very delicate subjects. I hate to discuss delicate things on the phone, because you run the risk of saying the wrong thing or having your words come out wrong. When you're texting or emailing, you can take a minute to think about your words and purposefully take control of what you're saying.
I make far less phone calls than I used to & they are typically of much shorter duration as well. I would rather text or e-mail these days.
Believe me, I work in a call centre and the phones never stop ringing.
Unless I'm expecting a call, I don't usually answer phonecalls from unknown numbers.
+Matthew Glen Evans I have had more disagreements and misunderstandings with people reading emails then assuming my mood and tone so I prefer to call if I might be taken incorrectly & follow up with an email if needed. G+ho would be best but some of my contacts will not bother with it.
+Matthew Glen Evans agreed, there is another side to that too. Still, hearing the person behind the facts sometimes mellows the message and makes people eager to find a common ground, whereas email often starts a more rational but also more destructive thought process.
The bulk of my calls (90% +) are very short, unless I call loved ones or relatives. Those calls vary in length.
Calling the iDevice iPhone was a Trojan Horse strategy back in 2007.
if all you are doing is texting, you are using your jesusphone like a dumbphone. do this experiment and look around you: most of the time, you will see people texting, not doing anything "smart".
In general I don't like starting/picking up a phone-call. However, if there's someone on the other line whom I haven't spoken to in quite some time, the conversation can actually turn out quite fun and lengthy. However, I still don't like picking up a phone because you never know what you can expect from it, and it requires a direct response.
I prefer asynchronous media such as IRC, e-mail and even IM services like MSN, gTalk and Skype messages, because you don't have to respond right-away to them.
As a recipient you can first read them and respond if/when it is convenient for you, and as a sender you can pick a moment you don't expect the recipient to be available to leave a message to be responded to at a later moment.
Note that I wrote Skype messages btw, since I find talking via Skype calls similar to actual phone-calls. Perhaps even more annoying, since you'll be talking to your computer screen (not to mention the higher chance of distractions by anything else going on on your (or the recipients' computer). Badly configured audio setups of voice chats can heighten the frustration levels even further.
I'm not thirty, yet, but I do think that the majority of my phone conversations have become shorter and especially less frequent. In general I speak to people via other media already more often, or at least we 'follow' each other's activities through various feeds. It gives us a (false?) sense of already being up-to-date about how they are doing, and reduces the feeling of actually needing to reach out to find out how they are doing. Before social media there was more an of urge to call and find out what someone was doing if you were reminded of them because of some random thing.
In general you called someone because you were genuinely interested in knowing how and what they were doing, or to make an appointment to meet/catch up. Because you usually hadn't spoken to them in a long time either, there was also a lot to talk about, thus leading to longer conversations.
This doesn't mean though that I no longer still have those long phone conversations any more. Especially since people tend to only share the superficial things online. During a phone conversation more serious things tend to still pop up easier, which can turn a 5 minute conversation into a half hour to an hour conversation.
and this all ended up being a much longer waffle than I expected too… ;p
+Marc Roelofs, I've spent the last 18 months working with North American and Eastern European teams remotely fixing, troubleshooting and coding for some hectic and sensitive situations.
It was wonderful using the phone with these guys, I couldn't wait to get on the phone to talk, chat, create, troubleshoot with them. It was like I was in the room with a fantastic, motivated, talented and creative team of people who were a pleasure to work with.
However, having meetings or contact for its own sake does not improve the experience over the phone or any other medium. {>_<}
+Max Huijgen, very true.
The sound quality on the cellphones I use haven't been able to match the nice tones I had from my landline. So I rarely have conversations on my cell and have no landline anymore at home. All emails texts and g+
+kristien marie petersen good point. I still prefer landlines when I can choose.
I am well over 30, and definitely fall into the "avoids voice calls if at all possible" category.
I find that I prefer emails for "slow async" messages, texts and IMs for "fast async" messages, in person when possible, and hangouts/video when in person is impractical. I reserve voice calls mainly for close family, and rarely at that.
I realize that some consider texts and SMSs to be a form of synchronous communication, but I've found that it's not difficult to train people to expect async responses. I've had chat sessions where 10 or so messages took well over a day.
I rarely call, but I think that has more to do with my personality than calls being outdated. I'm a bit socially awkward and I generally don't like people, so if I was forced to talk to people, it would be the former of communication with the least emotion or interactions, like text. But when I'm talking to someone I actually want to talk to (rare now a days) of rather it be in person or at the very least on the phone.
What I really love is having friends over and sharing face-to-face conversation.
If leave out business calls, I have maybe one or two calls a month. My personal mobile phone really isn't as much a phone as it is a portable Internet device.
When I receive calls, be it business or personal, it's on my terms. Just because you call, doesn't mean I will talk to you right then and there.
I actually switched everything around last year… I pay only like 5 Euros for actual calling and messaging, and I pay a sh*tload for internet access on my mobile…
It is actually the opposite for me.
80% of what my smartphone does, my tablet also does.
80% of what I can use my smartphone and tablet to do, I prefer using my tablet for.
So most of the value of even having a smartphone is gone for me.
It makes no sense to waste the battery using the phone to do what the tablet does right now. What I need is for my phone to be better at making calls and being clear – or even better, would be just being able to sync my tablet with a bluetooth headset so I can make calls without even needing a separate smartphone?
Asus FonePad or Padfone +Michael Kelly (I always confuse the two, but one does what you want)
interesting comment +Joel Webber on the evolving etiquette of chat.
+Max Huijgen I don't know if everyone treats it the way I do, but fwiw I've definitely found that I can train all my friends and family to expect async chats from me 🙂