much has been made of the millennial aversion to phone calls that could have been an email, and I have a little bit of this nature, but I think most of my aversion here is to being on hold and getting bounced around different call departments.
I kind of want to check if 1. the aversion is real and generational as common wisdom holds, 2. if it is real, if calling became a genuinely worse experience around the time millennials started trying to do things.
Data point: I’m millennial (born 1992) and have a pretty strong aversion to phone calls, which is motivated mainly by the fact that I prefer most communication to be non-real-time so that I can take time to think about what to say without creating an awkward silence. And when I do engage in real-time communication, visual cues make it much less unpleasant, so phone calls are particularly bad in that I have to respond to someone in real time without either of us seeing the other’s face/body language.
If I had to take a wild guess at why this seems to be generational, I’d suggest that older generations spent much of their lives with phone calls being the only way to quickly contact people far away, and prefer them due to familiarity. Perhaps if they’d grown up with email/texting being options, they’d be more likely to prefer them instead.
My guess is the aversion is real, and maybe somewhat cynically I see the rejection of phone calls and emails as motivated mostly by rebellion/fashion cycles rather than anything else. Phone calls and emails just aren’t cool anymore. Your parents used them, yuck! And all the boring, very uncool workplaces and companies require them. Very similar to how gen-z dislikes Facebook in favor of Instagram. Facebook is where the boomers are.
Data point. I was born in 1968 and I got a lot more averse to phone calls as email and texting got better. My reasons are visual cues and taking my time to think (as Wedge said), as well as certain kinds of phone calls having become much worse. The call to a large business where one can expect a phone tree has become far far worse than when one could expect a human to pick up. During the earlier years of cell phones, and again when digital audio started out, the call quality was frequently so bad that it was another significant push away from a phone call even to a friend. Finally, a phone call these days socially seems like more of an interruption, a demand, than an asynchronous communication.
much has been made of the millennial aversion to phone calls that could have been an email, and I have a little bit of this nature, but I think most of my aversion here is to being on hold and getting bounced around different call departments.
I kind of want to check if 1. the aversion is real and generational as common wisdom holds, 2. if it is real, if calling became a genuinely worse experience around the time millennials started trying to do things.
Data point: I’m millennial (born 1992) and have a pretty strong aversion to phone calls, which is motivated mainly by the fact that I prefer most communication to be non-real-time so that I can take time to think about what to say without creating an awkward silence. And when I do engage in real-time communication, visual cues make it much less unpleasant, so phone calls are particularly bad in that I have to respond to someone in real time without either of us seeing the other’s face/body language.
If I had to take a wild guess at why this seems to be generational, I’d suggest that older generations spent much of their lives with phone calls being the only way to quickly contact people far away, and prefer them due to familiarity. Perhaps if they’d grown up with email/texting being options, they’d be more likely to prefer them instead.
My guess is the aversion is real, and maybe somewhat cynically I see the rejection of phone calls and emails as motivated mostly by rebellion/fashion cycles rather than anything else. Phone calls and emails just aren’t cool anymore. Your parents used them, yuck! And all the boring, very uncool workplaces and companies require them. Very similar to how gen-z dislikes Facebook in favor of Instagram. Facebook is where the boomers are.
Data point. I was born in 1968 and I got a lot more averse to phone calls as email and texting got better. My reasons are visual cues and taking my time to think (as Wedge said), as well as certain kinds of phone calls having become much worse. The call to a large business where one can expect a phone tree has become far far worse than when one could expect a human to pick up. During the earlier years of cell phones, and again when digital audio started out, the call quality was frequently so bad that it was another significant push away from a phone call even to a friend. Finally, a phone call these days socially seems like more of an interruption, a demand, than an asynchronous communication.