The Telephone Nobody Telephones With

On texting, correspondence, and the quiet transformation of everyday communication.

I carry a telephone around in my pocket that I rarely use to telephone anybody.

That thought occurred to me this morning while reading Julie Beck’s Forgive the Bad Texters in The Atlantic. Beck describes texting as the currency of modern relationships, a phrase that caught my attention because, somewhere along the way, without quite noticing when it happened, texting became my default way of communicating with just about everyone.

If I want to get hold of somebody, I text them. I don’t consider calling first. I certainly don’t think about sending an email. I open whichever messaging app seems appropriate, type a few words, and send them off.

The curious thing is that I wasn’t always like this.

When mobile phones first became part of my everyday life, I actually used mine to make calls. Quite a lot of calls. But this was back when mobile phone contracts came with a limited number of minutes, and exceeding your allowance could become an expensive business. My wife, being rather more sensible about such things, encouraged me to start texting instead. It was cheaper.

So I did.

At first, texting was simply an economical alternative to talking. A way of passing along information without running up the phone bill. But somewhere along the way, the calculation disappeared and the habit remained. Then the habit became a preference. And eventually, without any conscious decision on my part, it became the normal way to communicate.

Nobody announced that we were moving from a culture of talking on the telephone to a culture of tapping on little glass screens. We just did it. One message at a time, until calling someone began to feel like the unusual thing to do.

Now here I am, carrying a telephone that only occasionally rings.

When convenience becomes culture

One of the things I enjoyed about Beck’s essay is the way she explores our strange relationship with texting. We love it because it’s convenient, but that very convenience has created an entirely new set of social expectations.

A text doesn’t require both people to be available at the same moment. Unlike a phone call, it can be sent whenever the thought occurs to you. The recipient can respond when they’re ready. Or at least that was supposed to be the arrangement.

Somewhere along the line, the freedom to respond whenever we liked became an expectation that we should respond as quickly as possible.

I find that a rather peculiar development.

We’ve invented a form of communication that allows us to reach people without interrupting them, only to establish a social convention in which failing to respond promptly can be interpreted as rude.

And the little indicators built into our messaging apps hardly help. Delivered. Read. Online. Typing.

What began as helpful information about the status of a message has become a collection of tiny social signals. Someone has read what you sent but hasn’t replied. Perhaps they’re busy. Perhaps they’re thinking about what to say. Perhaps they’ve put their phone down and gone for a walk.

Or perhaps, according to the anxious little narrator in your head, they’re ignoring you.

The technology gives us just enough information to begin inventing stories about what the other person is thinking.

Beck makes the point that when we communicate primarily through text, we lose much of the context that accompanies spoken conversation. There’s no tone of voice, no facial expression, no gesture to soften or sharpen the meaning of the words. We find ourselves reading between lines that may not contain anything between them.

Even punctuation has acquired a personality. A full stop, once an innocent piece of grammatical furniture, can now apparently convey irritation or passive aggression.

As someone who spends a fair amount of his life arranging words on a page, I find that rather amusing. The written word has always been open to interpretation, of course, but texting seems to have developed its own peculiar emotional grammar. We’re not simply reading what people have written. We’re examining the timing, the punctuation, the length of the reply, the presence or absence of an emoji. A perfectly ordinary message can become an exercise in amateur psychology.

And all because we know the other person probably has their phone within arm’s reach.

The letters nobody wrote back

A while ago, I made a small attempt to escape the tyranny of instant messaging.

I decided to start writing letters again.

Actual handwritten letters. Pen, paper, envelopes, stamps. The whole business.

There was something appealing about the idea of slowing down correspondence. About sitting at a desk, taking the time to gather a few thoughts, and composing something intended specifically for another person. Not a quick exchange of information, not a message fired off between other activities, but a little piece of writing that had been given its own time and attention.

I liked the physicality of it, too. The movement of the pen across the page, the minor ceremony of folding the paper into an envelope, addressing it, putting a stamp on it, and dropping it into a postbox.

Then the letter would disappear into the postal system and make its way to someone else’s home, where it would arrive as an unexpected little interruption in their day.

There was no delivered notification. No read receipt. No indication that someone was typing a reply. The letter simply went out into the world, and I had to trust that it would find its way.

So I wrote a handful of letters and sent them off.

Nobody wrote back.

Not one.

Now, before this begins to sound like a complaint about my friends, they did acknowledge the letters. They mentioned them when we spoke or exchanged messages. They enjoyed receiving them. A couple seemed genuinely delighted that someone had taken the trouble to write an actual letter.

But they didn’t write letters in return.

The responses came by text.

I found that fascinating. My little experiment hadn’t failed because the letters went unread or unappreciated. It failed, if failure is the right word, because I was trying to revive a practice that requires more than one willing participant.

I could choose to write letters, but I couldn’t persuade anyone else to become a letter writer.

And perhaps that’s what makes texting such an interesting cultural phenomenon. It isn’t simply a technology we’ve adopted individually. It’s a shared habit, a kind of social agreement that nobody remembers making.

You can communicate however you like, but there’s a gravitational pull drawing everything back towards the messaging app.

My letters went out as letters and came back as texts.

There’s something almost comical about that, although I also find it a little melancholy. Not because handwritten letters are inherently superior, but because writing and receiving correspondence once involved a particular rhythm. You wrote, you waited, you received, and then perhaps you wrote again. The space between exchanges was part of the practice.

A letter could be reread, kept in a drawer, rediscovered years later. Of course, text messages can be saved and revisited too, but they live among hundreds of other exchanges, buried beneath shopping lists, appointment reminders, photographs, and the practical arrangements of everyday life.

I suppose there’s a difference between receiving a letter and participating in correspondence. One is an experience. The other is an ongoing practice.

And a practice needs at least two people.

The burden of being reachable

One of the more surprising passages in Beck’s essay concerns nineteenth-century social etiquette.

Apparently, people were already complaining about the exhausting obligation to make social calls. There were simply too many people to visit, too many social debts to repay, too many expectations to maintain. Beck quotes an account from the 1890s in which one woman describes being haunted by all the visits she owed.

I rather enjoyed discovering that our predecessors were being pursued by the ghosts of unanswered social obligations just as we’re haunted by unread-message badges.

Perhaps human beings have always struggled with the demands of keeping in touch. We’ve simply found increasingly efficient ways of multiplying those demands.

What once required an afternoon of visiting or an evening of letter writing can now be accomplished while waiting for the kettle to boil. And because it’s so easy to send a message, we send more of them. More messages mean more replies, and more replies mean more little obligations arriving throughout the day.

There’s a distinction here that seems important to me: being reachable isn’t the same as being available.

Just because someone can send me a message at any moment doesn’t mean I’m available to have a conversation at that moment. I might be working, walking, reading, thinking, or simply doing nothing in particular. Yet the presence of a message can create the faint sensation of an outstanding obligation.

Someone has reached out. A reply is expected.

And because we all know that most people carry their phones around with them, silence has acquired a meaning it never necessarily deserved.

The unanswered letter sitting on a desk might once have suggested that someone hadn’t got around to writing back. The unanswered text can feel more personal, because surely they’ve seen it by now?

Perhaps they’ve even read it twice.

Perhaps they’re composing a carefully considered response.

Or perhaps they’ve simply forgotten.

The trouble is that the technology gives us very little way of knowing, so we fill the gaps ourselves.

Of course, there’s an irony in my noticing all this while being an enthusiastic participant in the texting culture. I’m not standing outside the phenomenon, lamenting the decline of civilisation. I’m right in the middle of it, tapping away with the rest of them.

I like texting. I like its convenience. I like being able to send someone a quick thought without demanding their immediate attention. I like the way a conversation can unfold in fragments throughout the day, picked up and put down as life moves around it.

What I find curious is how something that began as a way of making communication less demanding has developed a whole etiquette of demands of its own.

We gained the freedom to communicate whenever we wanted and somehow acquired the obligation to be available whenever anyone else wanted.

A telephone, after all

I don’t imagine I’ll be abandoning texting anytime soon. My experiment with handwritten letters didn’t exactly inaugurate a renaissance in personal correspondence, and I can’t see myself suddenly becoming someone who rings everybody for a chat.

Although perhaps I should make the occasional call.

There’s something rather lovely about hearing another person’s voice, about a conversation that unfolds without the opportunity to edit every sentence before sending it. Something about the interruptions, the hesitations, the laughter, the moments when neither person quite knows what to say next.

And there’s a pleasure in giving a conversation its own space. Not conducting it in fragments between other activities, but actually settling into it for a while, allowing it to wander.

Texting has its own pleasures, and I wouldn’t want to lose them. But I wonder whether, in allowing one form of communication to become so dominant, we’ve gradually neglected some of the others.

Not because they’re necessarily better, but because they invite us to relate to one another differently.

A phone call asks us to share a moment. A letter asks us to take our time. A text allows us to remain connected while getting on with the rest of our lives.

There’s room for all three, surely.

Perhaps that’s what I took away from Beck’s essay. Not that texting is ruining our relationships or that we ought to return to some imagined golden age of correspondence, but that it’s worth occasionally examining the habits we’ve allowed to become our culture. The little accommodations we make for practical reasons, the conveniences that become routines, the routines that eventually harden into expectations.

After a while, we forget there was ever another way of doing things.

I started texting because it was cheaper.

Now the calls are effectively free, and I still don’t make them.

Funny how these things happen.

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