First Voice Mail and Now the Phone Call?
A pair of posts that talk about the death of voice mail and the phone.
Legal Blog Watch talks about a recent article and a Deloitte report that looks into whether Gen X and Gen Y no longer prefer (or even respond to) voice mail: "Why No One Under 30 Answers Your Voice Mail." Good post with good comments. I'm anti-voice mail myself and for me there's a simple reason. I read a lot faster than I process audio (I strongly prefer blog posts to podcasts for this reason). There's probably a bit of the shortened attention span/immediate gratification going on here as well, but the bottom line is that for simple messages, email is more efficient for me, as the recipient. I have to give a quick nod to a comment from Scott Greenfield, which takes the subjects of one of the studies to task for not listening to voice mails left by their employers. This is on point (although it's odd that the employers were complaining about "broadcast messages" which are typically worth deleting without a listen). She who signs the paycheck gets to dictate the mode of communication. It's tough to argue with this. I have a short list of people whose voice mails I will listen to and this obviously includes clients.
[If you are leaving a voice mail and you're worried about whether the recipient will listen to it, maybe you can also have it transcribed and emailed to them, or as one of the articles suggest, emailed as an audio file.]
At the end of the day, I wont lament the loss of voice mail. I'm sure it was a useful invention for a spell, but its time has come and gone.
Wired magazine has a piece by Clive Thompson "on the Death of the Phone Call" and the reasons for this [via Bobulate/ Don Cruse]:
I'm sure a lot of ink will be spilled on whether the shift away from the phone to other modes of communication is good or bad, from the perspective of human interaction, etiquette, productivity, etc., but I can unequivocally state that I won't miss either the phone call or voice mail.
Hopefully over time, I can shorten the list of people (through training - you may notice my email response is slightly quicker than my response to voice mail) whose voice mails I have to respond to!
Legal Blog Watch talks about a recent article and a Deloitte report that looks into whether Gen X and Gen Y no longer prefer (or even respond to) voice mail: "Why No One Under 30 Answers Your Voice Mail." Good post with good comments. I'm anti-voice mail myself and for me there's a simple reason. I read a lot faster than I process audio (I strongly prefer blog posts to podcasts for this reason). There's probably a bit of the shortened attention span/immediate gratification going on here as well, but the bottom line is that for simple messages, email is more efficient for me, as the recipient. I have to give a quick nod to a comment from Scott Greenfield, which takes the subjects of one of the studies to task for not listening to voice mails left by their employers. This is on point (although it's odd that the employers were complaining about "broadcast messages" which are typically worth deleting without a listen). She who signs the paycheck gets to dictate the mode of communication. It's tough to argue with this. I have a short list of people whose voice mails I will listen to and this obviously includes clients.
[If you are leaving a voice mail and you're worried about whether the recipient will listen to it, maybe you can also have it transcribed and emailed to them, or as one of the articles suggest, emailed as an audio file.]
At the end of the day, I wont lament the loss of voice mail. I'm sure it was a useful invention for a spell, but its time has come and gone.
Wired magazine has a piece by Clive Thompson "on the Death of the Phone Call" and the reasons for this [via Bobulate/ Don Cruse]:
As far as the phone call goes I think I have an irrational dislike - maybe even a phobia - of phone calls. I have no idea why, but I've never liked the phone call, particularly the business call (it doesn't matter whether I'm initiating the call or the recipient of a call). I deal well with people in person and can speak reasonably well publicly/in court, etc. But I don't like making even a mundane phone call. The conference call is even worse. Rare is the conference call when you're not sitting there with someone droning on.This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.
Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)
The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.
I'm sure a lot of ink will be spilled on whether the shift away from the phone to other modes of communication is good or bad, from the perspective of human interaction, etiquette, productivity, etc., but I can unequivocally state that I won't miss either the phone call or voice mail.
Hopefully over time, I can shorten the list of people (through training - you may notice my email response is slightly quicker than my response to voice mail) whose voice mails I have to respond to!
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