Muerte al voice mail (2 April 2009)

Tyler Cowen linked to this NYT piece about the incipient demise of voice mail. When I clicked on it, I was astounded by what appeared in my tab as a description of the article: "For some, voice mail is losing its allure." For some? Its allure??? Who are these people who like voice mail?

The article notes, "In an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through 'ums' and 'ahs' can seem too much to bear." But that's a burden in an technological regime, I would think, and has nothing to do with "the age of instant information gratification," which ordinarily I'm rather concerned about. I think we feel obliged to consume too much of experience as information and process it. But on this subject of voice mail, I'm completely in sync with the techno-optimists who regard change as inherently positive. If you yearn for voice mail these days, you are hopelessly nostalgic for something that was actually detrimental and inefficient. I'm almost to the point where I have a revolutionary fervor about eradicating voice mail, and regarded it as somewhat treasonous when someone leaves me one or checks their own, thereby encouraging the continued exchange of information by that moribund medium.

I am heartened, then, by this:

Research shows that people take longer to reply to voice messages than other types of communication. Data from uReach Technologies, which operates the voice messaging systems of Verizon Wireless and other cellphone carriers, shows that over 30 percent of voice messages linger unheard for three days or longer and that more than 20 percent of people with messages in their mailboxes “rarely even dial in” to check them, said Saul Einbinder, senior vice president for marketing and business development for uReach, in an e-mail message.

I would have though that the end of voice mail would be celebrated by everyone, and its disappearance would go altogether unlamented. The article sets up a time frame that partially explains where its coming from -- in the 1980s voice mail was an innovation that must have seemed liberating; it ended the tyranny of presence. It made makeshift solutions to communications overload, like call waiting (an invention that never should have been), obsolete. But email should have ended the tyranny of the spoken word several years ago -- and I can't wait until all incidental mobile-phone communication is conducted through texts. No more frivolous speech acts!

For Charlie Park, 30, a Web developer in Williamsburg, Va., a text message is more efficient and — equally important — more respectful of the recipient’s time.
“You never send an e-mail that says, ‘Hey, e-mail me back!’ You’re always sending information,” he said.

I would hesitate to equate information delivery with "respect" -- that makes humans too much like mere data-processing machines -- but in my mind, this trend toward text is returning the sanctity to conversation, so that it requires all parties to be present and attentive and committed to a leisurely, reciprocal exchange of ideas. If talk doesn't rise to that level, let it be text.

The article ends on a sentimental note (a daughter's loving voice mail for her father), and the privileging of voice for communicating emotions. Not to go all Derridian, but the idea that presence is in the spoken word, and only distance is in l’écriture is a somewhat pernicious bias.I discover more about what I think by writing then by talking, there's no reason why that wouldn't be true about emotions. Somehow it almost seems easier to contrive emotions when speaking than when writing, where it takes careful, arduous artifice to produce an inauthentic emotion.

Long live philistinism (6 Feb 2008)

Brad DeLong linked to this dead-on condemnation of the NYT books section by Timothy Burke, in which he makes this excellent point:

What we won’t be paying for (at least not much) in thirty years is literary and cultural reviews and op-ed pieces. Not just because better can be had already online, in many cases, but because the old media ill-serves educated readers in those areas and has always ill-served them. This brings us back to the ethics and aesthetics of the closed world of editorial elite and the literati that used to exist unchallenged. Now we have choices, and our choices will proliferate still further as time goes on. We don’t have to settle for the choices that come out of small incestuous circle-jerk of New York editors, from their dispensing of favors through their immediate social networks.

Reporting stories is hard work: it involves long hours tracking people down and patiently asking them questions, it involves awkward confrontations with people who don't want to make news, it involves transcribing recordings and filing lifeless copy because one's ego is not meant to interfere with the information. There's a reason these people are paid and why their work is paid for. Having opinions on the other hand just requires curiosity, concentration, and a talent for expressing oneself in a clear and/or lively fashion. Many people have these abilities, which are highly enjoyable to exercise. Hence opinion will proliferate on the internet, to our collective benefit.

And having opinions, moreover, will hopefully cease once and for all to be a means of fantasizing that one belongs to the Algonquin Round Table, as it may have seemed when there weren't media in which ordinary people could express their opinions widely and publicly, or for us to search for them or run into them, say, on Amazon. Back then, being aggressively opinionated seemed a bit more tinged with pretension, with fantasies of self-aggrandizement. Now there's no need to pretend or posture; you can just broadcast your opinions and see if anyone cares. Now, one can't even imagine that it is possible to bluster one's way into some elite literati with nothing but opinions. And the mechanisms of that particular fantasy -- of preserving a critical elite -- need no longer hold the public forum for the discussion of art hostage anymore.

Phoning it in (13 Feb 2007)

Several bloggers have recently noted a dread of having to talk on the phone. Matt Yglesias wonders if this is "a common psychological profile to blogging's early adopters" and Amanda Marcotte argues that "the phone simply fails to live up to the internet as a form of remote communication. The advantages of the internet are that you have more control over when you speak to someone. In chat, if they’re online, sweet, you can talk to them. If you’re busy or distracted, log off and no feelings hurt. Email is casual but can be performed on your time. The telephone has none of the convenience or privacy of the internet, but it doesn’t really have the intimacy of in-person conversations."

I also hate the phone; it's ringing jangles my nerves like nothing else, particularly because I've saddled myself with a principled opposition (loosely based on Kant's categorical imperative) to letting it ring through to the answering machine. I can fully relate to Marcotte's point that phone conversations are not sufficiently immersive enough to stop one from, say, playing Freecell at the same time and missing two out of five words the other person says. Maybe being overly habituated to getting information through reading augments that problem; it may take words on a page to get me to really concentrate and focus, and it takes an interlocutor being in the room with me to enforce my attention. Phone conversation also rewards arbitrary space filling; getting a call can sometimes feel like being a television that a bored person's turned on, looking for distraction.

The problem with phone conversations, I think, is that they promise presence but produce absence. Phone talk is pseudo-intimacy that mocks real intimacy. A phone conversation delivers another's unique voice to you, but it's a faint shadow of really hearing them. With other forms of immediate long-distance communication available, what the phone as a medium now communicates (and with such force it tends to drown out whatever is being talked about) is the specificity of the person's voice, and how that voice is not there in the room with you. This prompts me to want to use the phone exclusively for making plans to see people in person in the very near future. Otherwise the fungible written word will have to suffice.

The phone can easily and unfortunately be deployed as a means to control other people.

But perhaps online communication may end up providing us too much control over conversation, making it something that is so completely on-demand that it will eventually become solipsistic. No one will ever be able to force you to discuss something you are not interested in, but perhaps should be -- instead you may be able to use online communication as a screen, tossing off postponing or superficial e-mails that seem to attend to such matters without really bearing down on them. "Real" interpersonal communication may require some actual sacrifice at some point, some reciprocation and compromise (for better or worse, the phone demands these). These are perhaps the building blocks of commitment to a specific audience. But online presence management seems to promise the eradication of these nuisances. You'll be able to have conversation only when it suits you, and you will pop online and be content to talk to whoever happens to be out there. The online population is so vast as to provide any number of people who might relate to you, or at least hold up the mirror in which you want to see yourself. The specificity of the other person may come to be fully irrelevant, leaving you typing for your own sake, for the pleasure it gives you to read your own words regardless of who it is prompting them. Hell, at that point you may as well be blogging.