How Text Messaging Murdered the Phone Conversation and Buried it under a Mountain of Social Anxiety

There’s almost a human like connection that can be made when you are on a phone call with another human being. You can hear how they are saying things. You can tell if there happy or sad, mad or glad. The inflection in their voice can tell you if they are tired or alert.

Text Messaging, while convenient, has lost a lot of what makes calling great. We replaced a lot of the emotional expression found in phone calls with emojis, gifs and memes. Poor substitutes for the connection we got over a phone call. True that in-person conversations were even better at allowing more intimate 1:1 interactions, anyone who has been on a blind date before knows that. But then enter the video call, is it the best of both worlds?

I remember back in the day Nickelodeon would do video phone calls with their contestants and if they answers some trivia correctly they would get a new Sega Game Gear. They literally had to be sent an ATT Video Phone to receive the call and they were broadcasted to the whole Nickelodeon audience. The Video was so choppy you could barely tell there was an actual person on the other line. I still thought it was the coolest thing ever because it represented a future I wanted to be part of, being able to video chat other people.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate phone calls way more than the next guy. Everyone’s feelings about phone calls have been tainted by the amount of robocalls bumping around…