For several years now, telephone calls have lost their relevance among the means of communication used by the new generations: by 2014 text messages had become more common among Americans under 50, and in general in Europe it is also increasingly It is common to hear comments irritated by the habit of telephoning – now considered intrusive – in cases where a message would be sufficient. On the Atlantic, journalist Amanda Mull then told of her experiment: going back to using phone calls to talk to friends and colleagues.
More than an experiment, Mull says, his was a life choice imposed on the people around him.
Mull writes that he started with his boss after developing an impatience with endless conversations about Slack, the popular internal corporate communications app that has now replaced email in countless offices around the world. On Slack, Mull says, the wait for other people's answers, filled only by the notice that “Paul is writing …”, had exhausted her: she wanted to know what she thought of his articles in real time, without waiting 30 seconds at a time to finish writing the message. Mull began by proposing to Paul to talk over the phone, then doing the same with his friends, generally getting enthusiastic reactions.
Messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, Telegram or WeChat have radically transformed the way hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people communicate. It is now difficult to find regions of the world where they are not used, and especially in the younger age groups they have almost replaced the previous methods of communicating. Remaining in the more familiar European or North American context, but which in many ways is similar to that of the rest of the world, there are studies according to which young people in their twenties or thirties have become intolerant of telephone calls, delegating all or almost all of the messages to your communications.
Mull was like that too, but she gradually realized something that was actually quite obvious: that is, that almost always to decide something via email or text it took much longer than talking to each other verbally. As Guhan Subramanian, director of the Negotiation Program at Harvard explained, every discussion is made up of constant questions and counter-questions, much quicker when asked verbally than with messages. “I wanted my thumbs to have the evening off,” Mull wrote summing up the common labors of a long chat discussion.
But in addition to the technical problems, the strange dynamics that now seem to regulate the etiquette of chats contributed to dissuading Mull from discussions by text: especially for young people, the concepts of end and beginning for conversations have disappeared, become a kind of uninterrupted flow.
Unlike in the past – the time of SMS, so to speak – we often expect an immediate response to a message in chat, in the same way as we expect a response to a phone call. But if it is quite easy for a phone call to be said to be unavailable, it is not always easy to avoid replying to a message. It can be ignored by replying hours later, but it is considered a bit rude practice, and with the frequency with which most of us consult our smartphones, the excuse “I only saw it now” has become not very credible.
There remain people who can get along better with the messages, which allow greater reflection on the words used: but it is under the eyes of all that it is often difficult to convey the tone and context of a conversation spoken in writing. It happens, therefore, that what one writes is very different from what the other reads, despite the help provided by emojis. But as Mull notes, there is a certain contradiction in scrambling to make a written conversation as natural as possible, when one click away is the ability to speak directly to each other.
And then, says Mull, no trace remains of phone calls, unlike messages that can be fished out at any time, even those written too hastily. In a sense, this mechanism made Snapchat's fortune first, and Instagram Stories later: there is evidently a widespread desire for content that disappears after a certain period of time, at a time when most of us have some Years old online comment that he would rather never pop up.
According to Jonny Gerkin, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina, many people are now reluctant to call because they believe the interlocutor may not take it well. According to Gerkin, however, at the same time most people agree on the limits of written conversations. For this, he suggests an elementary method: to challenge the cliché according to which calls are now an intrusive thing, asking the person we want to talk to if he wants to do it verbally as we do. It all depends on the type of communication: as Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues, there are those – practical, logistical, not urgent – for which written messages are more suitable; and then there are the more complex and articulated ones, so talking to each other is unbeatable.
Mull concludes by putting forward a hypothesis that may seem paradoxical: these uncertainties about the type of communication medium to use, and this shyness with respect to voice conversations, could concern Millennials – that is, those born between the 1980s and the mid-1990s – but not the so-called Generation Z, that is, those born between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. The former have in fact lived between one world and another, the one before instant chats and the next, and this made it difficult to truly master the tool. Twenty-year-olds and adolescents today, on the other hand, may find it easier to extricate themselves: and this is demonstrated by the popularity in this generation range of video content, from that of youtubers to those on TikTok, which can be interpreted as a form of rejection towards the ubiquity of written conversations typical of the online world known by those of the previous generation.
