Fwd: Were We Wrong to Give Up the Landline?

[Jon Woodlands]

Hi all,

this article appeared in The Conversation the other day and on the ABC website.

I have extracted what I see as the most valuable part of it here about our failing/falling personal communication rates.

As the landline in Australia is due to go from all homes from 2021 onwards its time to look at what the smart phone may have done for us and how its emasculated conversations.

​All the best,  Jon 🐒​

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Were We Wrong to Give Up the Landline?

The Conversation By Barbara Keys

Updated March 05, 2018

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-05/landlines-vs-mobile-phones-were-we-wrong-to-give-up-land-line/9508500

(Extract)

The Power of the Human Voice

In 1986 Americans placed 1.97 billion calls a day - eight calls for every woman, man and child. They were having about seven times as many telephone conversations as they had had in 1950, and the number was still rising. One human rights staffer told me of his work in the mid-1980s: "All the work was done by phone. If I wasn't in a meeting, I was on the phone."

Those calls were about much more than sharing information. Calling on a landline phone was a labour-intensive form of communication, but it provided immediate personal contact, an opportunity for genuine exchange, and an emotional depth that written communication lacked.   Calls were able to knit far-flung people into deeply felt communities because the phone transmits the capacities of the human voice.

The voice is one of our most powerful instruments, designed not only to communicate but also to build intimacy. Our voices convey emotion so effectively that we can identify emotions in speech even when the words themselves are muffled by walls. The voice indicates whether you are sincere - or whether you are drunk.

The powers of the human voice help to explain why talking on the phone can foster feelings of connection. Research on the telephone in the 1980s showed that a call made people feel wanted, needed, included, and involved.  This is why a recent Harvard Business Review study found that face-to-face requests were 34 times more successful than emails.

Better Technology doesn't Equal Better Communication

Critics of digital media say that it corrodes human relationships. The generation that has grown up on smartphones, which have become devices for avoiding talk, lack empathy and struggle to form friendships based on trust, according to one study.

In online communities, people tend toward narcissism and often dramatically fail to care about the feelings of others. Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian whose anonymous Facebook page in 2011 helped topple a dictatorship, concluded that social media facilitated "the spread of misinformation, rumours, echo chambers, and hate speech. The environment was purely toxic." Empathy vanished, he says. Landline calls helped to instill positive emotions: feelings of connection, pride, gratitude, a sense of elevation and happiness.

Psychologists tell us that whether we are extroverts or introverts, we need human contact and feel more alive after connecting with other people. Phone calls created those connections. They made people more optimistic and resilient and broadened their mindsets. For activists, talking revealed connections they would otherwise have missed, and deepened their personal commitment to the cause and to one another.

The landline phone, of course, was not a flawless medium - static, missed calls, busy signals, dropped connections, prank calls and phone threats guaranteed frustration. You can bond over the phone, but you can also argue.

But the rise of smartphones - which Americans check eight billion times a day - has not meant that we communicate better. More communication can mean that we hear each other less.  Among American millennials, the number of voice calls they make is falling as texting soars. And that means we may be losing a powerful part of what connects us to each other.

Barbara Keys is associate professor of US and International History at the University of Melbourne. This article first appeared in The Conversation.

First posted March 05, 2018