I was just e-mailing back and forth with one of my best friends, and was about to send yet another e-mail to clarify something, and then I was like: "What the hell am I doing? Why don't I call her on the phone?" And so I did. And we had...a conversation. And it was great! It relieved the loneliness of working at home much better than typing. I think people should e-mail and text less, and talk on the phone more. Especially when it actually saves time (There's this assumption that you cut out some kind of unnecessary chatter by e-mailing/IMing, but I think that's exaggerated).
Talking on the phone is also cool in a romantic, retro way. I even think people should talk on land lines more -- as much as possible. First of all it's less potentially-carcinogenic. Secondly there's not all that trouble with bad reception. And thirdly, it can feel really nice to hold a good old-fashioned receiver. I have a non-cordless phone and love it. It's the wall-mount-option kind, and I even wish it were the big clunky desk model.
Talking on the phone more is also a way to counteract all the overproliferation of "hot" media by chilling out with a nice "cool" medium.
3 comments:
Amen. And I'd say that's all part of an even larger movement: a friend recently showed me "his iPhone," which was a bunch of note cards held together with a rubber band, and I seriously actually felt (and feel) a little jealous. Maybe there's a kind of neo-Luddism around the corner. I fantasize about sitting in front of a typewriter and talking to not-present human beings only on a—let's go nuts and call it a rotary-dial phone!
Neo-Luddism - love it! Perhaps also newspapers, day-planners, address books, maps, watches, magazines, and books (!) should come back.
Not to get all Wesleyan here, but I think another danger with email is that it produces an automatic power dynamic. Well maybe.
Clay Shirky, in his book Here Comes Everybody, talks about how email exposes how "it is easier to ask a question than to answer it...E-mail...without needing the permission of the recipient, is providing a way for an increasing number of us to experience the downside of fame, which is being unable to reciprocate in the way our friends and colleagues would like us to do."
The other side of that is that the email senders can "do their part" very easily and then demand a response from a party who suddenly has the higher hand.
Something like that. Class starts Tuesday and I'll write more after I hear what the right answer is.
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