Millennials and Gen Xers, I'm told, refuse to use the telephone. Today the New York Times tells me that Gen Z wants to kill off email:
Members of Gen Z do seem to agree with their elders on one thing: Email. Ugh. And, if we’re lucky, maybe they can one day save everyone from overflowing inboxes.
....Adam Simmons, 24, prefers to communicate using “literally anything but email.” Mr. Simmons, who is based in Los Angeles, started his own video production company after graduating from the University of Oregon in 2019. He primarily communicates with his eight employees and his clients, which are mostly sports teams, over text, Instagram messages and Zoom calls.
If you read very closely, you'll notice that the peg for the entire piece is a study from a consulting firm called Creative Strategies about which apps are most used for collaboration with fellow workers. This puts everything in a different light. Of course young workers are abandoning email for collaboration. Email sucks for collaboration. Even we dinosaurs who use it that way know perfectly well that it's horrible.
But collaboration is just one thing that we do at work. We also communicate with the outside world, for example, and email works fine for that. Adam Simmons may prefer text, Instagram, and Zoom calls, but that's just personal preference. In what way is a huge pile of unread texts or an unwieldy Instagram inbox any better than email? I'd even say it's probably worse. At least email once offered the minor blessing of putting everything in one place. Nowadays you have to check five or six different apps to see if anyone is trying to get your attention.
The underlying problem here is obvious: We have made communication too easy. And just as cheap hamburger spurs people to buy more hamburger, cheap communication spurs people to communicate more. What we really need is to figure out a way to make communication more painful.
Consider the olden days. In 1990 there was only one way for people to get my attention: they had to call me and then leave a message if I wasn't there. The post-Boomer generation is quite correct that this was a pain in the ass. It leads to the dreaded "phone tag," and it can also lead to misunderstandings because nothing is in writing. On the other hand, it's also true that a two-minute conversation can often take the place of five or six emails. And I probably got no more than a dozen phone calls a day.
Millennial and Gen X folks had no idea of the havoc they were creating when they gave up on phone calls and instead moved to "more convenient" methods of communicating. For one, more convenient meant higher volumes. For another, it was basically an excuse to avoid actual conversations, where sometimes people get mad at you. For folks who don't really want to communicate all that much in the first place, email and text have advantages: It's easier to ignore anger in written communication; it's easier to ignore written communication completely; and written communication favors highly educated verbal folks.
So they got their wish. Among the young, the phone is dead, replaced by a massive increase in overall communication. How's that working out for you?
I love, love, love email. When my phone rings, it interrupts my concentration. And if I pick up, I'm seldom ready with the best possible responses. With email, I can read them when I'm ready and respond when I've composed my best response. Glad to be spared unnecessary phone calls.
Zooms are great for groups, not so much with one-on-one. And they're far more work to set up than phone calls and the connections are more fragile.
+1
I turned off the ringer for unknown numbers.
...and turn it completely off when in appointments and at the movies or when I sleep. It's all in the scheduler in my phone.
And if I pick up, I'm seldom ready with the best possible responses.
I think this is clearly one of the biggest drawbacks of phone calls, and the lack of this factor one of the biggest advantages of email and messaging.
I'm old enough to remember a time when, not only did we have to rely solely on the telephone (because things like email hadn't been invented), but we didn't even have caller ID. Makes me break out in a cold sweat just thinking about the barbarism of that era.
Or when the phone lines could all get blown down by a storm and they'd all be laying along the road in a heap.
I also like email.
In the past I worked in an accounting department. Having things in an easily organized and findable system, was considered an absolute necessity.
Then I moved into a field that is almost entirely made up of introverts. Any sort of immediate communication that is seen as interrupting someone else's quiet work time is considered horribly rude.
Email seems to be the preferred choice in both situations.
OK boomer. We don't need to trudge through 4 feet of snow, 4 miles each way, five days a week, to appreciate the value of...something.
But wouldn't it be great if people could all went back to using carrier pigeons, and there were mass pigeon relay stations in the middle of towns, and dotted throughout the countryside, and everyone had that great sense of community hanging around in the coop all day?
That's 4 feet of snow, 4 miles each way, five days a week, uphill both ways, in barbed wire underwear.
Making communication "more difficult" is easy. Before hitting "send", proofread. Check speling. Grammar. Make sure your sentences (yes, you have to use them) make sense, and communicate the ideas you intended.
That's what a good email is like. And that's why "tweets" & texts & Instagramies and all the other off the cuff, quick, non-thinking (and thus CONVENIENT!) new "apps" are so favored. Because one never has to put any work into them.
D_Ohrk
Here's a GenX story for you:
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/science-technology/high-speed-solar-storm-approaching-earth-can-interrupt-cell-phone-gps-signals-281587
At a speed of 1.6 million kilometres, a powerful solar storm is approaching the Earth. The storm will hit the Earth on Sunday or Monday.
A report by Spaceweather.com claims that the storm has originated from the Sun's atmosphere. This would have a significant impact on the region of space dominated by Earth's magnetic field.
"THE SOLAR WIND IS COMING: Later today, a high-speed stream of solar wind is expected to hit Earth's magnetic field. Flowing from an equatorial hole in the sun's atmosphere, wind speeds could top 500 km/s. Full-fledged geomagnetic storms are unlikely, but lesser geomagnetic unrest could spark high latitude auroras. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.", reads the post on their website.
Because of the solar storm, there will be a view of fascinating celestial lighting for people living at the North or South Pole.
Spaceweather.com added that the outer atmosphere of the Earth could be heated, due to solar storms, which could have a direct effect on the satellites.
This could cause interference with GPS navigation, mobile phone signal and satellite TV. The current in power lines can be high, which can also blow transformers.
As per the US space agency, NASA, the speed of the solar storm could increase from 1.6 million kilometres per hour.
**********************************
40 years from now GENx-ers will have their grandchildren on their knee regaling them with stories of how they survived the Solar storm of 2021.
"We lost our GPS we were totally lost"
"Couldn't text - we were in a total panic"
"My smart phone heart monitor was telling me it had lost the signal - I thought I was dead".
DISCLAIMER - I am a Boomer who lived across the street from our school !!!!!!
Also, if you really want to make communication more painful, turn your phone off and log out of your email account between X:XX and X:XX everyday.
We really just need a virtual babel fish.
What is with the constant need to be "connected"
Forget email, texts etc
What about locator services? I know of several security firms that track employees by watching where THEIR phone is while on the clock. We monitor glucose levels constantly through our connected devices. We watch our "step count" the same way along with a host of other medical parameters.
It's not just communication we're talking about here.
Why track their phones? Wouldn’t it be easier to just track the nanobots in their COVID vaccination?
More accurate, too. People can forget to bring their phones with them. They don't ever leave their bloodstreams behind.
Thats funny
Seriously though. You have to down load an app to track your time and submit the hours for your paycheck. They watch where your phone is while you are "on the clock". They notify you when you are needed at a different location by phone.
I don't know if all this "connectivity" is a good or a bad thing. I guess for an Alzheimer's patient it is a good thing to be "tracked"
I like the convenience but hate the intrusion into my life. I can control the level of the intrusion to a limit and that is whats disconcerting to me. How long before we CAN'T control the level?
Spammers will chase you down whatever medium you use. If you don't get spam in some new medium, it's probably because not enough people use it to make it worth while for them- when it gets really popular, there will be spam.
Spam is really a function of whether the platform is willing to filter it out or not.
Disqus still struggles with this. Though obviously, Coral is not the antidote.
From a teacher's perspective, email + Google Classroom = great communication with parents & students. Phone calls are a last resort.
Even Gen X knew this: Tupac faked his death to remove himself from a Death Row Records Reply-Allpocalypse, & only three years after Kurt Cobain killed himself due to the weight of Spam Email his Compuserve account was unable to filter.
"In 1990 there was only one way for people to get my attention: they had to call me and then leave a message...."
Oh my goodness. In my day, you had to send a carrier pigeon or telegram - followed by a courier on horseback if you were serious. The sound telegram or the Marconi - that's soooo boomer, no thanks!
"Leave me a message" really. No one returns phone calls anymore - leaving messages is pretty outdated & pointless since no one checks them.
no Western Union?
Don't people send voice messages/mail via text in the US? We do that all time here in China (via WeChat). I literally can't remember, though, the last time I actually left an actual "phone call" voice mail.
Where I work, Teams is hyped to replace email. It’s the same thing really.
If you don't have the self-discipline to not check your email constantly the problem is not with the technology.
As for Gen-z, I could really care less about what the posturing posures who are texting 24/7 think about use of email. I was at a 4th BBQ and every gen-z kid was on their phones the entire day. It is like how many of them "don't own cars because of the environment" yet take Ubers everywhere. They may buy their own hype, but I don't.
Signed, Gen-Xer.
Texting is almost literally dial-up email.
SMS is just AOL.
As Dave Barry observed, email is CB radio with typing.
don't worry, they have an app to translate voice to text.
and there's another app to read your text messages to you.
A phone is a television, books, radio, magazines, newpapers, passed notes in class - all in the same device.
I don't know what's wrong with you that you'd dislike it.
Expensive, too small, hard to read, have to type with thumbs, fragile, have to charge it all the time, makes you fall in man-holes and get hit by cars, makes you look like a goober, and probably makes you an actual goober.
Just for starters.
Kids have been on their phone texting each other all the time for, what, 15+ years now.
The first thing they do as they get out of middle school is text their friends--even if that person in 10' away.
Today, they have video too--posting photos, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
If we lived in a just society all communication would be by singing telegram.
How many people would that employ? Women, barbershop quartets, yodelists, boy bands . . . every text message arriving personally.
There was a Dave Berg Mad Magazine joke I remember. A guy gets a telegram and insists the Wester Union guy sing it. So he does:
Tra la la la, tra la la la, tra la la la,
Your mother is dead.
That's excellent!
God bless the Usual Gang of Idiots
Gen X is 10 times as good as Gen Z. Even the Millies look good to those idiots. Wokeism and selfishness run amok.
Why blame us Gen Xers? We didn't invent email. That was you boomers.
And shoot I remember not only regularly speaking to friends and family members on the phone, but writing and receiving letters. And I'm not talking when I was a child. In college and in my early 20s I wrote to people all the time and it was not a particularly weird thing to do. If I were to receive a letter in the mail from an actual human today I'd be pretty shocked.
At this point if my phone rings I assume it's a spam call. I almost never send or receive an email outside of work. My work communication with my colleagues takes place almost entirely over Slack and Teams or Google Meet calls. I communicate outside the company mostly via email.
But to me the real sea change is not so much changing communication format from phone to email to texting to WhatsApp or whatever. It's that, outside of my mother, I pretty much never reach out to anyone (or have anyone reach out to me) over any channel just to chat. We might arrange to meet if we are going to be in the same town at the same time. A phone conversation or casual email exchange happens maybe a few times a year. I wonder if this is common with everyone and if really what's happening is not so much different modes of communication but less actual human-to-human communication just for the heck of it.
We can't all be Henry Rollins's unrequited love for Ian Mac Kaye.
(Seriously, those two dudes talk on the phone at least once a week for thirty minutes.)
I suspect buried in a few weekly magazines from the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were letters (mailed) to the editor lamenting how this newfangled thing called the telephone was going to be the death of (wo)men of letters…
As with our colleges so with a hundred "modern improvements;" there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract us from serious things. They are but and improved means to an unimproved end, an end which is was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate...We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bing the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear is that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
-Henry David Thoreau
How that man would have loved a weblog.
The man didn't work, & could only sponge so much off his parents &/or Emerson.
Thoreau definitely would have had a subscription substack.
e-mail is great. When I phone someone they might just be enjoying their afternoon coffee. Or a bout of migraine has just hit them. If they are not present I have to leave a message and hope the call will be returned. Which may not happen. Or I might have my migraine when it happens.
When I e-mail recipients can read it at their convenient time and respond at their convenient time. And I can respond back at my convenient time.
Plus: it is easier to make a cogent argument in writing than orally when most people constantly interrupt.
Certainly the fact that my carrier has decided I cannot block voicemails from numbers or incoming calls from robots has degraded the value of that service.
There's an app for that, lazy moron. LOL
Today in "Old Man Yells at Clouds".
I hardly use my phone for anything unless I absolutely have to. It's cramped, feeble and uninteresting.
Almost the only way to get hold of me is by email, and if you can't manage to operate that, I don't know what to say.
I have an actual phobia of using the phone. Email was a godsend.
And how do you convey useful information in a text or Instagram DM? Using a phone keyboard to type out anything over two sentences is absurd. A text with four abbreviations and three emojis isn't getting the job done.
"Millennials and Gen Xers, I'm told, refuse to use the telephone."
So ends the long & happy era of phone sex, which has been around since long before the boomers.
From 1902: Making Love by Telephone
https://twitter.com/PessimistsArc/status/1413909633022894087?s=20
Now they can do it with video. No wonder that phone sex has died out.
As OnlyFans proliferates & we get further & further from the era of 900 numbers, that Seinfeld plotline about Kramer & the 976 number will lose whatever punch it has left.
Josh Marshall on JD Vance,
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1414046951327338500
Let the knowitall pud Ivy Leaguers fight.
In almost every case, I prefer to communicate literally any way EXCEPT for on the phone. Or on video calls.
Emails, texts, anything written - give me that.
And do not EVER leave me a voicemail. Ever. I will despise you.
Weirdest omission in that article is the failure to mention few had cell phones when email got started. In fact, email had a solid 10-12 year head start on cell phones, and thus texting and chat apps. Not to mention Facebook, etc.
I think most people in the US had a cell phone before email. I got my first cell phone in 93, I think -- just when they were beginning to explode in popularity. I don't think I had email until maybe 96 or so, when I first got internet access. I doubt my experience was all that unusual.
Just occurred to me: you meant "smart" phone (not "cell" phone). I think?
I got my first cell phone (with very limited range before roaming and/or long distance charges applied) in 1998. I had email at work in 1993, and at home in 1995 (Remember "You've got mail!")
> Nowadays you have to check five or six different apps to see if anyone is trying to get your attention.
No you don't. I don't.
You don't "have to" but many of us find that we do. For me it's phone, texts, work email, work IMs, home email (two addresses used for different purposes), and Facebook.
> it's also true that a two-minute conversation can often take the place of five or six emails.
Yeah, because most people are incompetent about reading email and replying to the questions asked.
> written communication favors highly educated verbal folks.
I find that verbal communication favors highly educated verbal folks. I personally have a hard time thinking when talking. I do much better when writing. Insisting on communicating with me verbally is a good way to take advantage of me.
Sorry, but the failure is in folks assuming a single one or two types of communication is sufficient and bludgeon folks with those. Email, chat, online meetings, and phone calls all have their place. It's the users' inability to choose the appropriate one (which is generally predicated on the urgency, type of info involved, and the recipient). Instagram, twitter, etc are just public broadcast chats and not unique collab tools.
It's really not that hard.
Why would I ever want to talk to one of them anyway?
The reason I use email primarily, at work - unlike my colleagues using slack, zoom etc - is that it gives me a persistent archive thats easily searchable , of whats been said in the past. This has been incredibly valuable to me at various times in showing that the idiot decisions taken were over my protest, rather than recommended by me (for instance).