Clive Thompson’s latest Wired column is about how <a href=”http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/st_thompson_deadphone/” target=”_blank”>many human beings are making fewer telephone calls these days</a>, exceptionally among the younger human beings, who find other method of communication a abundance more efficient. As Thompson notes, voice calls are “terribly designed,” from a usability and efficiency standpoint:
<blockquote><i>
Consider: If I suddenly choose I desire to dial you up, I have no path of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no thought why I’m calling. We have to open Schrodinger’s box every age, having a conversation to figure outside whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail much more excruciating: Studies exhibit that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)
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The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any data about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more age thinking about what we desire to affirm.) For all the hue and weep about becoming an “always on” society, we’re really moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.
</i></blockquote>
That at the end mark is a really fascinating one. One of the “features” of the “always on” society is the circumstance that we’re really ending up with bigger tools for managing our age — and the “ancient” telephone system really doesn’t fit into that setup. Thompson notes in the piece that he simply won’t answer calls that aren’t scheduled — and I’ve been reaching the same stance lately myself. I really find it odd when human beings call me without contacting me first to locate up a age to call. If anything, it nearly feels “rude.”
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Of direction, some of this could also be <i>corrected</i> by bigger technology — such as allowing a telephone to indicate some of your status, such as whether or not you’re busy. Bigger yet, would be a system that automatically built in a scheduling feature if someone wanted to talk to you.<br /><br /><a href=”http://techdirt.com/articles/20100729/16253610419.shtml”>Permalink</a> | <a href=”http://techdirt.com/articles/20100729/16253610419.shtml#comments”>Comments</a> | <a href=”http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20100729/16253610419&op=sharethis”>Email This Tale</a><br />
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