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The Strange Fate of the Business Phone Call
Workplace phone-calls used to have rigid, unforgiving specs. The Internet made them weirder
I’ve stopped calling people on the phone.
I realized this the other day while inspecting my mobile-phone bill. Apparently I made only 8 minutes worth of phone calls in all of January. That’s pretty average for me, in fact; in 2022, I made fewer than 10 minutes of calls each month. (Except for July, when I blew it out with 23 minutes.)
It’s not that I don’t talk to people! I’m a reporter. Literally all I do is talk to people, much of the day, and write down what they say.
It’s just that these days, those conversations essentially never take place in a traditional phone call. Instead, I talk to people almost exclusively via video. First I email (or text) my interview subjects; we figure out a good time; then I send them a link for a Zoom or Google Hangouts session.
I realize I’m an extreme case here. Many folks still make plenty of phone calls. There are loose generational differences; older folks (generally) prefer a voice call, younger ones (generally) prefer texting or video chat. There have been plenty of pieces written pondering the many reasons younger people are more averse to making phone calls.
