The Phone Call Is Dead

“New forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.” An author at Wired says lighter forms of communication are superior. “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,” says Clive Thompson about new communication media. “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.”