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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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From: LindyBill7/30/2010 10:10:33 AM
1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) of 794003
 
I dislike the attempt to give me news or POV on the Web in video. Just too slow. Give it to me in print. When I dance with the 20-somethings every week, they are all texting like mad. All of them are now on Facebook. My 14-year-old Granddaughter finally talked her parents into allowing her on Facebook. The picture of her only shows her arm holding her dog. I want to talk to them, I do it with Facebook messages.

"Voice Phone Calls Are So 20th Century

Clive Thompson argues voice phone calls are dying and deserve to die.

According to Nielsen, the average number of mobile phone calls we make is dropping every year, after hitting a peak in 2007. And our calls are getting shorter: In 2005 they averaged three minutes in length; now they're almost half that.

This jibes with my experience. I rarely use the phone for voice calls and then mostly for people who for some bizarre reason have phones that can't handle SMS or email messages.

One obvious problem with voice phone calls is the need for both sides to be available at the same time. As Thompson points out, voice calls are more emotionally demanding. They pull us away from what we have in front of us (whether physically or more abstractly in front of us) to focus on trying to emotionally read what someone else is saying, when to interrupt with our one responses (harder when you can't see the other person's face), and whether we are being understood.

I find that when someone reaches me on the phone and I answer in case it is important then the result is often awkward. Sometimes I find out the purpose of the call is not important, that the person calling is just trying to kill time, and the call is not worth interrupting a conversation I'm having with someone I'm with. The caller then feels slighted when I beg off and ask them to call later.

Then there is the inefficient caller. They talk slowly, pause, provide too much set-up for their key message. The same person could provide the same information much more compactly in an email or SMS message. Same happens with voice mails. I want a way to tell the voice mail program to speed up playback and cut out pauses.

Parenthetically, I'd like the same capability to speed up Google Tech Talks and other lectures on YouTube (e.g. the rate of delivery in this video lecture is too slow. I've come across occasional political video sites that let you speed up playback. So this is technically possible.

Will video phone calls with phones like the HTC Evo 4G reverse the trend away from phone calls? You going to be more inclined to call people once you can watch their faces during the phone call? Or will Android's messaging features such as GMail integration make you even less inclined to do voice calling?"

futurepundit.com
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