When can I call you? The death of the phone call

Generation Z has not known a time without a phone. Landlines beside the door of a childhood home, mobiles in the hands of working parents, telephone boxes dotted between village greens or local shops. Two of these I have watched die. The once-polished red telephone boxes have become a hub for graffiti artists, and wires of landlines hang unplugged. Yet, as I walk past these abandoned phone boxes, I hear my own phone ring, and I let it ring out until it dies.

I would watch my friends glance at their phones when it buzzed. Some declined it, others ignored it, and all of them would continue walking. I never thought this to be strange. It is too easy to rationalise away the guilt of declining the phone: I could be rushing somewhere else, doing something different. I could be unwinding with no energy for a conversation or simply too lazy to speak aloud coherent thoughts. Sometimes, it would be an unknown caller (telemarketers or scammers, we’ll never know), or sometimes it could be from a friend that requires a specific mood to talk to. Truly, the reasons are endless, yet the point remains: timing is everything. And it seems this generation is not rushing to answer.

A quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer the phone according to Uswitch

“We’ve become recluses as a generation, and it’s only become apparent since the Covid lockdown,” Emilia Sullivan, a second-year English with Creative Writing student, tells The Boar. The lockdown was when time seemed to stop and slow down. As students, our to-do list beyond the home was reduced to necessities: buying groceries, breathing in fresh air, and taking out the rubbish. Everything else, like schooling and work, was done online. The rush of getting ready for school, preparing an outfit for a date, whispering to your friends in class – it all disappeared. Though we had video calls for class, it did not mean we left the bed or spoke to our classmates. Every day seemed indistinguishable, and although we depended on phone calls and messages to communicate with our friends, it was schedule-dependent. The class calls were scheduled, and friendship calls could be ignored. Whilst you couldn’t exactly run away from a real-life conversation, it suddenly became very easy online. After all, it’s not as though there was a rush to arrange to see anyone. Could it be possible that this routine has spilt into our post-lockdown world?

A quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer the phone according to Uswitch. Nearly 70% of respondents indicated that they would prefer a text, and over half admitted that a phone call would lead them to believe they were about to receive bad news. I admit, it sounds awfully like we’ve developed a Pavlovian response of anxiety towards a handheld device. A mysterious weight has been placed into a phone call, one that may have been established since it became our only point of contact during lockdown. With a phone call, I find myself reliant on a faceless voice as the only social cue. The Conversation highlights that we can often feel “self-conscious of the sound of our own voices and our choice of words.” In the absence of body language and eye contact, it’s easy to doubt the relevancy and truth of our own words. Unlike a voice note, we can’t delete and restart our thoughts. It’s as if our spontaneity has died with the phone calls. In its place is the text message.

A text message, however, says everything you want it to say, just as you intend to frame it, able to be edited, made to be read at your will

I wanted to call someone today. A friend that I’ve known for five years. I didn’t call. Instead, I sent a text: ‘Can I call you soon?’  I’m not sure when we started to ask one another for permission to have a conversation. A five-year friendship seemed proof enough that conversation came easy to us. It’s not out of respect, I assure you, that I texted first. But rather, I need to buy myself time to ask: what will I say, how will I say it, and what is the most important thing? As the minutes of your conversation tick above a phone call, the lapses of silence turn from comfortable to a painful reminder of the time away from necessity. It is not the same silence in real life, where we could people-watch together and sip warm coffee. It is heavy, that same feeling when the phone first rang.

A text message, however, says everything you want it to say, just as you intend to frame it, able to be edited, made to be read at your will. Small talk is eradicated, but so are the little details of each other’s lives that we may have missed. Though we still talk to a faceless being with only our interpretation of tone as a social cue, it is also an excuse if we say something wrong. All you have to do is delete. Yes, the ominous ‘[name] is typing…’ can be daunting, but it could mean the start of what Amanda Mull calls a “roiling conversation that never really begins or ends.” Without the expectation of an immediate answer, we can take what we never seem to have enough of, time.

Maybe this experience is not universal, but it is mine. Like a text, this article relies on the reader’s judgement of tone and meaning. We have been exposed to analysing texts on a page at a much higher capacity than taking unexpected phone calls. Its familiarity is comforting. Trying to find reasons for the death of phone calls exceeds the speed at which it’s dying. Because of this, I remain a victim of it. Well, until my digitally illiterate grandfather decides to call. He, too, seems stuck in a different time.