[saber6]

As a 33 year old I really am confused by this statement.

While I love my texting, slack, etc, nothing replaces the low-latency engagement (intimacy) of a one on one phone call. I can parse someone's tone very easily on a phone call. Text rarely conveys such depth.

[nicoburns]

I struggle with phone calls. I find them quite anxiety inducing with anyone who I don't know well. I think because I find it hard to read tone of voice accurately, and to control my tone of voice to accurately convey my emotions.

I generally much prefer in person contact. And messaging to arrange it.

Also: not sure if you are young enough to be in the MSN generation? But a good chunk of my generation (I'm 26), grew up spending every evening conversing via text for a chunk of our teenage years. We got pretty good at conveying emotion through text (using longggg words... elipsis for pauses, emojis, and idioms (lol, lmao, AF), etc)

[leetcrew]

I'm also 26, and I definitely relate to the teenage IM experience. I think the problem with phone calls is that it's an unnatural level of focus to give someone you don't know well. when you meet face-to-face, there's always some little distractions available to fill the gaps in the conversation. silence is way worse without context; after fifteen seconds or so, the other person will say "hey, are you still there?" I also find myself missing one word out of every other sentence the person says, so there's a lot of backtracking.

as an aside, I've noticed that my cohort of people who grew up sending hundreds of messages/texts to their friends every night don't really interact that way anymore over text. back then if the person was online, they would usually respond immediately and you could exchange a lot of information really fast. now every response seems to take a few minutes or an hour (I do this myself too, don't mean to blame anyone). it has the weird effect of making text a less useful way to communicate than it was ten or fifteen years ago. I guess when everything is immediate and urgent, nothing is?

[nicoburns]

> as an aside, I've noticed that my cohort of people who grew up sending hundreds of messages/texts to their friends every night don't really interact that way anymore over text.

Yeah, same here. Don't have time for that anymore! I also have the freedom to go an see people in person in a way that I didn't back then (well not currently, but most of the time!).

[xenospn]

It's even worse for me if I know the person.

[sudosteph]

Yeah, I'm only a couple of years younger than you and I feel the opposite. I'm always trying so hard to parse the words and meaning, that I easily miss the sentiment of spoken words.

It's one of those things that I realize is probably just on my end though. I've had speech issues since I was a kid and am technically on the autism spectrum. I've learned enough by now so that most people wouldn't guess either of things - but real-time streaming audio processing is one of the few things I just can't learn or accommodate for. It's like I'm always 3 seconds behind in understanding what was just said. Often, I can even recite back what was said to me before I can parse it. I'm surprisingly fine at highly technical conversations / phone troubleshooting though - because it's easier to anticipate the path of the conversation and sentiment isn't usually a factor. Taking tons of notes helps too.

From my experience, text can absolutely convey a significant degree of intimacy - but it takes a great deal of practice to do so fluidly. There is some latency - but the trade-off works to my benefit since I don't have much more latency than my peers on average.

[magduf]

>nothing replaces the low-latency engagement (intimacy) of a one on one phone call.

For a lot of people, texting absolutely does replace the intimacy of a phone call. I have an ex-girlfriend who almost never talked to me on the phone, and only wanted to text, and she was like this with all her friends too. Note the "ex-" part here...

[this_user]

Phone calls are just terrible when you try to convey complex information. Just recently had that issue with a business deal where it only became clear that we were not on the same page w.r.t. some important details after I put things into writing after an IRL meeting and several follow-up calls. The lesson from this is always to follow up with a summary e-mail, and to avoid anything more complex than a simple yes/no or maybe arranging a time and date by telephone.

[ClikeX]

Depends on what info I need. For most colleagues I'll just need some quick non-emotional information to do my job. Calling them up just takes up time.

Same goes for clients calling about an issue and trying to stay on the line while I fix it. It's just inconvenient in that context.

Hearing someone is great when I need to discuss some opinions. Or when you really need live interaction.