Captain's Phlog 2020.02.09

Captain's Phlog 2020.02.09
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TODAY IN THE GUARDIAN: I feel it speaks to the heart of a lot of what I do.
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*** The lost art of having a chat:
*** what happened when I stopped texting and started talking

‘People are almost always nicer on the phone than on text.’
Illustration: Leon Edler/The Observer

We are more connected than ever, but we rarely seem to really speak to
each other. So, [72]Rebecca Nicholson decided to try

Main image: ‘People are almost always nicer on the phone than on text.’
Illustration: Leon Edler/The Observer

Sun 9 Feb 2020 04.30 EST Last modified on Sun 9 Feb 2020 05.12 EST

Like most people I know, my Weekly Screen Report is obscene. Every
Sunday, when the notification pops up to tell me the hours I have
wasted, mostly texting, I think about all the things I could have done.
Finished Middlemarch. Started Middlemarch. But as I have my phone in my
hand, I scroll through Instagram instead. I send an article or a joke
to a friend, a picture of the dog to the family WhatsApp, catch up on
someone else’s night out. Recently, I clocked up – and I’m ashamed as I
write this – six hours and 29 minutes of phone usage in a single day. I
have had days where I’ve barely been awake that long. Messages is my
most used app. I am talking all the time.

But I am rarely talking. For the chatterboxes among us, this is a time
of upheaval. The long, spontaneous chat on the phone is going the way
of the fax. The percentage of households with a landline that’s used to
make calls is declining every year, from 83% in 2016 to 73% in 2019;
the number of calls made on house phones plummeted by 17% in 2018
alone. We still use our mobiles to talk – in 2018, Ofcom surveyed
mobile users for three months and found only 6% of them never made a
single call – but we are not talking in any great depth. The same study
found that over 80% of calls were shorter than five minutes, and the
majority were under 90 seconds. I looked at my own recent call list:
three minutes, two minutes, five minutes at a push. What can you say in
that time? You can only make the point you’ve called to make.

I know many will welcome this as a kind of freedom. The very idea of
talking on the phone invokes horror among those who claim to loathe it.
There are thousands of memes explaining the many ways that talking, not
texting, is rude, basically criminal. Calling is not time-efficient,
ill-suited to the attention economy, where all eyes must be on several
screens at once. You can send messages when you’re doing something else
– watching The Irishman, or having a bath, or even talking to another
person in real life. My dad recently marvelled at me being able to text
with two thumbs; I marvel at teenagers being able to text while talking
to you and not looking at the screen. Once technology gave us the
ability to easily screen calls, we ran with it. We can ignore the
relative who phones with a list of recent hometown tragedies, the work
call we don’t feel like taking, our chattiest of friends who might not
let us go for an hour. But what happens if you are that chatty friend?

Smart phones are smart enough to tell you that you’re using them too
much. The dumb phone is making a comeback. I wondered if it was
possible to ride this wave of the digital detox and make a deliberate
effort to call instead of text. I wanted to see if it would change my
relationships, particularly the ones I had grown lazy about
maintaining. The plan was to stay off text and DMs for a solid month. I
was fed up of paddling in the shallows. I wanted to swim. If I needed
to speak to someone, I’d have to call them.
An illustration of an old fashioned blue cartoon telephone with a green
dial and a slightly evil face beneath the dial an a figure behind
holding his mobile phone in front of his face in horror
[76]Facebook [77]Twitter [78]Pinterest
‘If the phone rings after 7pm, one of us has to say, “Who’s dead now?”’
Illustration: Leon Edler/The Observer

When the writer [79]Elizabeth Wurtzel died in January, a piece she
wrote in 2013, about her “one-night stand of a life”, began to
circulate again, and it contained one paragraph that hit me
particularly hard. “Look at how we live,” she wrote. “We communicate in
text messages and emails; even those of us old enough to have lived in
a world where landline was not a word because it’s all there was have
fallen into this lazy substitute for human contact. I have.”

Who hasn’t? It should be easier than ever to talk. There are limitless
outlets for publishing our thoughts, endless ways to begin a kind of
conversation. Voice memos are popular, particularly among young people,
but they’re a halfway house, still one-sided. We talk with one eye on
efficiency, and it strangles what is so good about it – the
spontaneity, the lack of ability to control what happens when two
people are rambling on to each other.

The psychologist [80]Sherry Turkle has been studying the impact of
computers on human psychology since the early 1980s, and in 2015 she
published Reclaiming Conversation, in which she referred to “the edited
life” that we live now. She spoke to teachers who observed that their
students seemed to develop empathetic skills at a slower rate than they
would be expected to. “Face-to-face conversation is the most human –
and humanising – thing we do,” she wrote. “Fully present to one
another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for
empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being
understood.”

Are we losing that joy of being heard? Most offices are quieter places
than they have ever been. The open-plan rooms I have worked in over the
last decade or so are filled with people wearing headphones, silently
tapping away on Gchat or Slack. Even workplaces that should invite
conversation are making it easier to avoid talking at all. If you stay
in a budget hotel, you can check yourself in and out. If you scan your
onions on the supermarket’s self- service checkout, you don’t need to
chat about what you’re planning to do with them. When it was common
enough to be considered a problem, making a phone call on public
transport used to be frowned upon. In the early 00s, Dom Joly built a
TV career out of shouting “Hello!” into an oversized mobile in public
places. Train carriages are now full of heads bowed, illuminated by
blue light. A few years ago the [81]Daily Mash ran a much-shared
satirical news story: “[82]A northern man has left a trail of terror
across London by attempting to interact socially with everyone he
meets.” And even in the north, screens have begun to dominate. Quiet
carriages are becoming redundant. We are making ourselves quiet.

In 2014, someone set up a family WhatsApp group. Before then, I spoke
to my family on the phone all the time. Now, we spend more time in
touch with each other than ever before, yet I miss them. It’s a
noticeboard, more than a conversation. The person I still speak to most
often, and for longest, is my nan, who is 83. She has a mobile, but
doesn’t text. The other day I phoned to see how she was, and she told
me a long story about how she was never supposed to have the name that
she has, but there were 23 pubs in the village she was born in, and her
father stopped in at most of them on the way to register her birth. By
the time he got to the clerk, he’d forgotten what he’d been told to
call her, so he named her after the clerk instead.

Verbal conversations are unpredictable and unwieldy in a way that those
written down are not, because when we type or tap, we are in control,
of our side, at least. This ruthless chat efficiency has excised the
flab but, I realise, I love the flab. It’s where the excitement
happens. I wanted to revive those conversations with everyone. So in my
month of no texts, the WhatsApp group would be the first thing to go. I
went to delete the app, pressed my finger on the screen, let it wobble
– and then I stopped. There was a video of my niece dancing in front of
the TV that I wanted to show my partner and I thought, I can just look
at the photos and videos, every now and then. Can’t I?
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Dr Scott Wark is a research associate at Warwick University who studies
culture, technology and social media; his PhD thesis was about memes. I
called him to see if we are actually moving away from verbal
communication. He was in Chile for work, and I couldn’t get through
until I emailed to check he was there. But when we finally managed it,
he was more optimistic than I had anticipated.

He does believe that people are less willing to make calls. “It feels
like more of an imposition. If I want to talk to my boss, we schedule a
time to make a call. She doesn’t just call.” He points out that social
media gives us far more control over a chat. “Even though there’s an
idea that everyone’s addicted to social media and constantly checking
updates, you can ignore a notification of a message. If I’m chatting to
a friend in Australia, and I stop responding to her, I’ve probably just
gone to sleep and I’ll pick it up the next day. It’s a continuous
conversation that doesn’t interrupt anything and is parallel to
whatever else we’re both doing.”

Wark disputes the idea that we are becoming more disconnected; he says
it’s important to make a distinction between disconnection and
distraction. If people are becoming more mindful about their phone
usage, though, does he think calling might make a comeback?

Texting trims the flab of chatting. But I love that flab

“What people are responding to, with the idea of a ‘digital detox’, is
this overload of distractions. That is a huge problem, because there
are all these demands on our cognitive capacity and that’s
overwhelming, and exhausting. We’re spread thin.”

It’s good to know we’re all at it. There is a running joke in my house
that if the phone rings after 7pm, without a text to warn that a call
is coming, one of us has to say, “Who’s dead now?” It’s not ha-ha
funny, but it speaks volumes about what the once humble phone call has
come to mean. I thought it was just us, that we’d developed gallows
humour after a year of the kind of calls that drain the blood from the
body, that in saying the worst out loud, it somehow would ward off more
bad news.

Wark said that he, too, thinks the worst if he has an unexpected missed
call. When I talked to my friends about it, I realised that most people
feel the same way. A phone call, out of the blue, is alarming. It’s a
harbinger of doom, its ringtone a tiny scythe. The first thing I say
when I answer the phone is usually, “What’s wrong?”

On the first day of not texting for a month, a friend had some bad news
about her health. I wanted to know how she was. But I thought calling
would alarm her, because it has become alarming. So I texted, and we
had a text chat, while the telly was on. Calling really would have felt
like an imposition. I thought I’d call my girlfriend to see what she
fancied for dinner, but she was on the tube, and the missed call made
her worried that something had happened, so we ended up texting about
that, too. My month of not texting was barely even a day old. I failed
completely.

I am wary of nostalgia. Nobody wants to hear another old person
chirping that it was better in their day. When I spoke to Dr Wark, he
sounded hopeful about the changing nature of communication. “I’m 31,
and I’ve been chatting to people online since I was nine. Talking to
people on text is totally naturalised,” he says. “Younger people are
more willing to FaceTime one another now, and be watching TV, without
really saying anything, just hanging out. There’s a different kind of
presence involved.” There’s an argument that all this texting
facilitates people meeting up in real life anyway, he says, and
research to back that up. We may be more distracted than before, but we
are more connected. I ask Wark if he’s a texter or a caller himself. It
depends, he says, on the person, and his relationship to them. He calls
his mum, he texts his partner. “But personally, I would prefer to meet
my friends and just talk to them in a pub.”
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I could not stop texting, but in the search for a better connection, I
did start to call more. I started to phone to cancel plans, and it
proved a good litmus test: having to talk about it made me consider
whether I genuinely wanted to cancel, or whether I was just being idle.
I phoned a friend to say that, honestly, I couldn’t be bothered to
travel for 45 minutes to see a film I wasn’t interested in and he said
that, honestly, neither could he. We talked for half an hour. My
girlfriend is often away for work and it’s become clear that talking on
the phone once every couple of days is more substantial and infinitely
nicer than constant texting about humdrum stuff.

On the Failed Day of No Texts, it became horribly apparent just how
compelled I was to share every little detail of what was happening to
me. I dropped a plate, and went to tell someone about it, anyone. But
to realise I might have to call someone to tell them I was clumsy,
which they already knew, made it seem totally redundant. I felt free,
somehow, from the obligation to transmit the boring bits of my life as
rolling news. By texting less and calling more, I was reminded that
people are almost always nicer on the phone than on text. Face to face,
they’re even nicer than that. Arguments are resolved more quickly. It
is much more difficult to be rude, and we could all use a bit of that.

Talking on the phone scares people. Technology has created a new
rigidity when it comes to conversation. Calling is usually planned,
scheduled, and to call is to really mean it. I still text, all the
time. I feel inordinately proud of myself if my screen time drops below
three hours a day. But I am calling more, too. I am back in the habit,
and for me, it is infinitely more satisfying to have a conversation
that is two-sided and flexible and unpredictable. I just send a text to
say I’m going to call first.

References

Visible links
72. https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rebeccanicholson
79. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/10/elizabeth-wurtzel-obituary
80. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/18/sherry-turkle-not-anti-technology-pro-conversation
81. https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/
82. https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/northerner-terrorised-london-by-saying-hello-20151001102473