Phone shy, and a good reason for it

I never really liked talking over the phone. I am the type of person who devotes his attention to the matter at hand. That means that if I’m on the phone, my attention is squarely on the conver­sation I’m having, thereby monop­o­lizing my time and energy. I am unable to do anything else. I find the phone call to be a crip­pling activity. I have a phone stuck to my ear and a hand stuck holding it there. A phone call is unfair: I am either giving my attention to the person on the other end or to the task at hand. Doing it any other way divides my attention, reducing the quality of both the activity and the phone conver­sation. I greatly prefer the richness of the human expe­rience: talking face to face. You reap the benefits of greater animation and more accurate impres­sions. When I talk over the phone my mind drifts. I find it hard to focus on phone conver­sa­tions. Talking over the phone is boring. You do not see the glimmer of one’s eyes as they get excited. You do not hear the subtle into­na­tions of their voice as they wax philo­sophical. You do not feel the energy that they project as they expe­rience their own emotions. You do not see the smirk on their face as they make a snide comment. There is no depth over the phone: commu­ni­cation becomes flat and unin­ter­esting. Yes, we hear the laughs, the sighs…but they mean less without the face that emotes.

Instant messaging and e-mail are even more imper­sonal. Instant messaging was orig­i­nally designed to be user noti­fi­cation systems. E-mail was borne from the need to commu­nicate between main­frame computer users. Neither was designed to create a rich commu­nicative expe­rience: they were meant for rather business-like inter­ac­tions. The indi­vidual nuances that give a person their unique persona are stripped, and conver­sa­tions become barren. Yes, we have ways to emote, namely through smilies. But we can only do so much with smilies. I do not believe that we can effec­tively convey person­ality through a combi­nation of two or three char­acters. Where is the subtlety of a smile that creeps up on one’s lips? Where is the delight that magi­cally springs onto one’s face? How does one convey a mixture of shyness and curiosity? How does one express a gentle smile borne of melancholy?

Writing a letter is still a personal affair. There is the choice of stationery, the choice of ink and how it is delivered. The subtle pauses that one can detect in the flow of one’s writing gives one all the more to work with. The way the ‘i’s are dotted, the flourish of the ‘t’ that was written, the hefty punc­tu­ation of a period…it all combines together to form a tapestry of emotion, a snapshot of your spirit at a particular moment in time.

We are increas­ingly becoming reliant on elec­tronic means to perform an inher­ently human action. Machines filter out the nearly tangible emotions and expres­sions that come with an engaging face to face conver­sation. Why deprive oneself of the joys of human intricacy? Human beings are complex crea­tures. The task of of being repre­sented on a screen in two dimen­sions is impos­sible, yet we continue to attempt to squeeze every drop of humanity out of pixels on a screen. It’s a real shame. It really is.

The author acknowl­edges the use of elec­tronic commu­ni­ca­tions to be most conve­nient and effi­cient. However, he still prefers his personal inter­ac­tions to be face to face.