A Quick Refresher on Basic Phone Etiquette
Quarantined at home, we’ve rediscovered what phones are really for
Ever since Alexander Graham Bell beat the pack of competing inventors to the big payday in 1876, the telephone has been changing the way humans communicate. For the better part of a century, the device was the center of the American household, a clunky contraption nailed to the wall or honored with its own little telephone-table. Teenagers dragged it into their rooms, trailing tangled wires behind them. E.T. wanted to “phone home” in the classic 1982 Steven Spielberg film, stretching his gnarly finger to the heavens.
Then, the phone calls petered out. Email and texting were faster and easier. Social media offered new ways to chat and flirt, and work messaging systems such as Slack made many calls obsolete. Asynchronous communication became the norm, allowing us to send or reply any time.
And it was great! Typing out our conversations piecemeal didn’t take up as much time — or emotional energy — as a phone call did. We didn’t have to wait our turn to talk, or to actually deal with people in real time. “Why are we still calling them phones?” Quartz asked in 2015, alongside a chart of global mobile traffic showing that data usage for texting, apps, and internet browsing dwarfed data usage for voice calls.
