8 August 2010 You have to take this but I don’t

8 August 2010 You have to take this but I don’t


Texting generation doesn't share boomers' taste for talk



By Ian Shapira

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, August 8, 2010

“Jane Beard and Jeffrey Davis didn't realize how little they speak to their children by phone until they called AT&T to switch plans. The customer service agent was breathless. The Silver Spring couple had accumulated 28,700 unused minutes.

"None of the kids call us back! They will not call you back," said Beard, a former actress who with her husband coaches business leaders on public speaking.

A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, creating new tensions between baby boomers and millennials -- those in their teens, 20s and early 30s.

Nearly all age groups are spending less time talking on the phone; boomers in their mid-50s and early 60s are the only ones still yakking as they did when Ma Bell was America's communications queen. But the fall of the call is driven by 18- to 34-year-olds, whose average monthly voice minutes have plunged from about 1,200 to 900 in the past two years, according to research by Nielsen. Texting among 18- to 24-year-olds has more than doubled in the same period, from an average of 600 messages a month two years ago to more than 1,400 texts a month, according to Nielsen. “

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/07/AR2010080702848.html?hpid=topnews

I rarely talk to the children of my first marriage. They, too, do not return phone calls, do not return voice mail or e-mail; with varying frequency. Part of this is due, of course, to the rancorous and vicious nature of divorce, in general, and the one they know, in particular. The rest of the lack of communication is in keeping with the generational gap noted above.

There is, apparently, a need for younger generations to feel connected to their circle of friends and acquaintances. After 30+ years of being on call or having to be instantly available to the job, I have never wanted to be that connected. Further, I don’t normally live my life with that much dependence upon others to make my plans in group-think mode.

To me, the constant connectedness that younger generations accept as desirable is intrusive. I don’t want to receive a constant string of location updates, pictures of people I don’t know, marketing ploys, etc. If I want to avoid intrusion, I turn the phone off rather than keep it in active reception mode. Where the younger people above feel phone calls are rude, I feel that the constant intrusion of cell phone ringtones announcing messages, and voice mails is extremely rude to the person I may be or am talking with at the time. I see no reason to avoid blocking out segments of time to talk to people by phone. After all, that’s what the device was invented to do, talk to other people who are not physically present.

Text messaging is problematic for me, and, I suspect, for others my age due to the small size of the screen and keyboard involved. Trying to construct a grammatically correct message using my thumbs instead of the touch-typing methodology I learned all those years ago is difficult with arthritic fingers. The garbled nature of txt-speak along with the horde of “emoticons” based upon that damned “smiley face” is offensive at some visceral level. I appreciate that English is a constantly changing language but I object to the dumbing down of a language that has such depth and scope into something designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

My thoughts on this matter will have exactly no impact upon the matter, or upon anyone else’s thoughts regarding the evolution of interpersonal communications. I don’t expect that anyone will read them. No one will text me concerning this entry and no one will call be to speak about it. This is not an attempt to convince my kids to call me and talk.

But I only discuss recipes by voice or by e-mail.



The article below is interesting in that it depicts “reachability” as both desirable an undesirable. Anyone who’s ever been on call could have nailed that conclusion at the drop of a hat.

mentioned in the above article:

Control Freaks: How Online and Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Contact - By: NAOMI SUSAN BARON

http://www.languageatwork.eu/readarticle.php?article_id=32



“Table 1: Reachability (including ‘I reach others’, ‘others reach me’, and ‘directionality of contact not specified’)



In every country, what subjects liked most about having a mobile phone was reachability. However, what people (especially Koreans) complained about most was also reachability -- typically the fact that others could reach them. The low Japanese statistic partly reflects the fact that subjects had other issues to complain about, including the phone’s transmission problems and cost. There might also be cultural factors at work, e.g., in Japan it might be considered impolite to complain about others being able to reach you.”