Communication in the modern era

Earlier this week I read somewhere that these days spoken phone calls are becoming less popular than alternatives such as texting, instant messaging or video calls.

Apparently a new survey conducted for Sky Mobile found that 80% of people contacted said they preferred messaging or video calls to making phone calls, albeit that 45% preferred making phone calls when speaking to their parents.

Other findings in the survey were as follows:-

Over half of 18 to 34 year old schedule their phone calls – whereas only 25% of Over 55 year olds do this.

Answerphone messages are generally seen as a nuisance – as many as 10% of those surveyed said they deleted answerphone messages without listening to them.

40% of those contacted said that traditional phone calls were their preferred means of having “proper catch up” conversations with close family and friends and 33% said it was the best way to share major news, whether good or bad.

Inevitably, upon reading the above, I found myself comparing the finding of this survey with my own experience.

For far too large a proportion of my teenage life onwards, I regarded the sound of a phone ringing in my vicinity as being a signal of someone trying to contact me either in extremis and/or, alternatively, in order to impart to me news of the most important or life-changing nature.

I’m referring here to the likes of e.g. a road traffic accident or other medical emergency/catastrophe suffered by someone close to me; a declaration of war having been issued by Downing Street; or perhaps (hopefully) that the Euromillions ticket I had bought earlier in the week on a whim with some change discovered in my pocket had subsequently and coincidentally been found to contain the same numbers as those drawn the previous evening as those that had won the £160 million jackpot.

Bitter and frustrated experience over the next fifty years gradually taught me different.

Being an oldie and quite content when left to my own devices and my own company, these days few things cause me more irritation than when – for example, having just prepared myself a spot of evening tuck also involving a couple of beers and settled in front of the television upon a Friday evening in order to watch a “live” Premiership rugby match – the phone rings just at the point when the referee blows his whistle for the first time to commence proceedings.

My general attitude is that- if I had wanted to speak to anyone in the world about anything – I would already have done it before preparing my supper.

I accept that – in the perfect order of things, let’s leave “cold calls” out of this – the person who has decided to call me at 7.45pm on a Friday evening probably has in their mind some reason or another as to why they might wish to speak to me.

But that’s not the point. I don’t want to speak to anyone at that moment.

My point being, dear readers, is that these days – as a general rule of thumb – I rarely answer phone calls.

The best that can be said is that I will listen to any answerphone message left for me and – if a reply is warranted – I will ring the caller back at a moment of my own choosing.

Then there are a list of not a few people – my estimate being 40% of everyone who has ever happened to inveigle their way in my contacts/address book – who, quite frankly, ordinarily I would prefer not to speak to because either they are so boring, uninteresting, tedious, long-winded that I need to find at least a half hour period in my busy day to “waste” talking (or listening) to them, which slot is rarely easy to find … or, alternatively, I know that the subject they’re going to be on about is of no/little interest to me or, worse, is something that (at that moment in time) I don’t wish to address in any event.

Which is why, today, I blog today in order to announce that I am a recent convert to the facility of WhatsApp voice-messaging.

This has two distinct advantages:

Firstly, as regards incoming messages, I can seek out a moment in the day – e.g. a decision to make myself a cup of tea or a meal – when I “turn on” a message and listen to it as an accompaniment to something else. Or, alternatively, I can sit with a notepad and “jot down” subjects and/or points of view that I want to address in later replying to a voice-message in kind.

Secondly, as regards outgoing messages, I can speak at my own pace, without interruption, and list the points I wish to make in the order I wish to make them … and then “get off”.

It’s a bit of a quasi-Alistair Cooke experience – viz. it is as if one is “broadcasting” to someone metaphorically on the other side of the world and hopefully getting one’s points across succinctly whilst also perhaps displaying one’s personality in the form of improvised asides or quips.

It’s all about “being in control of one’s own time” – and not constantly being at the beck and call of other people’s.