I had to look this guy up. He’s not the baseball Tom Goodwin. He’s an “influencer,” a “digital transformation space” entrepreneur/speaker/writer, and as such it’s no wonder he’d rather interact with others by email and text rather than by phone.
Click on the image, though, and you can scroll through a lengthy list of Twitter responses from people who feel the same, including me, an aging Boomer from the pre-digital age. I always hated making phone calls, even when that’s all we had, and didn’t much like getting them either. I wrote letters, lots of them, and loved getting them in return. Still do! And email. And text messages. Even when I feel pressured to reply instantly, I still have a few seconds to think over what I’m going to say before I say it. I need that kind of buffer.
At a guess, phone calls account for less than 10% of what I do with my iPhone. Texting comes in around 20%; taking photos and videos 50%; looking shit up online the rest. And those phone calls? Mostly from Donna, little tugs on my electronic leash.
We rented the first year we lived in Tucson, then bought the house we’ve lived in the last 23 years. If we hadn’t bought, rent increases would have forced us to move, probably more than once. And each time into smaller, less-nice quarters. For all I know, we might have been in a trailer park by now, sweating eviction in the face of a sudden $1,000 rent increase. A sobering thought. I’m having a lot of them lately.
How bad does it have to get before Americans take to the streets, demanding wages that keep up with inflation?
Exactly the same here. I love writing, text, email, and snail mail penpal letters to my grandmother until she died. Probably the reason I’m a blogger.
Making and receiving phone calls, otoh, is mostly just annoying. You need the thing for emergencies but otherwise it’s used by me just like by you, mostly for web viewing, texting and emailing. And reluctantly and with no pleasure as a telephone. In fact my ancient Galaxy S5 phone got too old for my estranged spousal unit’s service and I’ve been using wifi phoning for months now. It is even crappier than normal phone service, with bad latency that makes phoning even more unpleasant than usual. Plus no 911 or phoning away from home or business wifi. But you sure can’t beat the price- viewing stupid scam crypto adverts now and then. So I’m shopping for a new phone and service and not liking any of it. Seems to me telephony should be as free as email since it probably costs less for voice only and the infrastructure was amortized 50 years ago. But then I’m a radical democratic socialist so that’s how I roll.
Tod recently posted…Tomorrow Belongs to Kyle Rittenhouse