My understanding is that the Web 2.0 thing to do now is express hatred for ye olde telephone and call for an all-Twitter based form of communication. But I can't. I love the phone! What I hate is that everybody else hates talking on the phone. I've got phone based relationships with my family, and my two best friends from high school, but that's about it. And it's getting harder and harder to expand the circle. Used to be that calling a friend up to chat was no big deal. But now it would seem very strange for me to call one of my friends without an express agenda or specific query. You'd get the initial exchange of pleasantries, and then, an expectant, "so, what's up?" Nothing is no longer an acceptable answer to that query.But that's a shame. I don't really bother keeping in touch with people by e-mail. Even the most well written, comprehensive rundown of the month's events doesn't do me much good. After all, I'm not actually that interested in simply keeping up with the signposts of their lives. I'm interested in keeping up a connection with their lives. And that's very, very hard to do through written text. There's a big difference between informing and interacting.And that may also be part of the problem. I spend all day writing what are, in effect, e-mails about my opinions and thoughts on politics, health care, and occasionally, cooking. That's work. The last thing I want to do is put my personal relationships in that same box of "things I sit down at my computer to do." But the problem with the migration away from the phone and towards less intimate, less stressful mediums of communication, is that it's made the unbidden, purposeless phone call an odd act. People are very surprised when it turns out you have nothing in particular to ask of them. And as folks get such calls more and more rarely, they're ever more surprised by them when they come. It's a nasty feedback loop that's going to end with us all communicating in bursts of 160 characters or less. We need to start phone cubs, or have some secret punctuation in our e-mail signatures that lets friends know we're accepting calls.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Monster [who is not, so far as I know, Hillary Clinton].) IN PRAISE OF THE PHONE.
My understanding is that the Web 2.0 thing to do now is express hatred for ye olde telephone and call for an all-Twitter based form of communication. But I can't. I love the phone! What I hate is that everybody else hates talking on the phone. I've got phone based relationships with my family, and my two best friends from high school, but that's about it. And it's getting harder and harder to expand the circle. Used to be that calling a friend up to chat was no big deal. But now it would seem very strange for me to call one of my friends without an express agenda or specific query. You'd get the initial exchange of pleasantries, and then, an expectant, "so, what's up?" Nothing is no longer an acceptable answer to that query.But that's a shame. I don't really bother keeping in touch with people by e-mail. Even the most well written, comprehensive rundown of the month's events doesn't do me much good. After all, I'm not actually that interested in simply keeping up with the signposts of their lives. I'm interested in keeping up a connection with their lives. And that's very, very hard to do through written text. There's a big difference between informing and interacting.And that may also be part of the problem. I spend all day writing what are, in effect, e-mails about my opinions and thoughts on politics, health care, and occasionally, cooking. That's work. The last thing I want to do is put my personal relationships in that same box of "things I sit down at my computer to do." But the problem with the migration away from the phone and towards less intimate, less stressful mediums of communication, is that it's made the unbidden, purposeless phone call an odd act. People are very surprised when it turns out you have nothing in particular to ask of them. And as folks get such calls more and more rarely, they're ever more surprised by them when they come. It's a nasty feedback loop that's going to end with us all communicating in bursts of 160 characters or less. We need to start phone cubs, or have some secret punctuation in our e-mail signatures that lets friends know we're accepting calls.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Monster [who is not, so far as I know, Hillary Clinton].) 
