Opinion: It’s impolite to call

The Verge drew attention to the ineffectiveness and intrusiveness of calls for smartphone owners

journalist The Verge Thomas Ricker believes that in the age of the popularity of smartphones, forcing people to use voice calls and be distracted from other tasks is to behave intrusively and ineffectively. Ricker backed up his words with recent marketing research.

According to Ricker, in 2015 there are a huge number of ways to achieve a person’s attention without immediately distracting him from other activities. A phone call is not suitable for this, the journalist claims.

We no longer live in the age of flip phones and all-in-one phones, which have dedicated buttons to start and end a call. Their raison d'être was voice communication.

With the invention of smartphones, the “phone” became just another communication application. Something that can be quickly removed from the list of frequently used ones.

Hell, most phone reviews these days don't even mention sound quality or signal quality because the importance of calls pales in comparison to how quickly we can post our beautiful selfies on Instagram.

A phone app is just another service like a gym in your home: you rarely use it, but you wouldn't live in a place that didn't have one.

Thomas Ricker, journalist for The Verge

According to Ricker, the requirement for a new communication etiquette does not apply to those who grew up in the days of landlines or older people who still do not have a smartphone. What annoys him most is his friends with iPhones: some of them call just to deliver one piece of news that can easily fit into a text message.

Don't get me wrong: conversation is still important. I would not like to find out about an important event in the life of a close friend via SMS. But if you want to tell me about your engagement, let's do a video conference for the sake of completeness. We can do it on FaceTime, Hangouts or Skype if you like. Or Line, or WeChat if you're in Asia. […] Otherwise, send me a link to a map of where we'll meet and I'll happily buy you coffee while we act like proper human beings.

Thomas Ricker, journalist for The Verge

According to a June study of global telecommunications markets by Ericsson, already a quarter of Android smartphone owners in Japan do not use voice calls. This is due to the established culture of text communication in Asian countries: email is popular in Japan, and, for example, mobile instant messengers are popular in South Korea.

Although the West lags somewhat behind Asia in this regard - largely due to the proliferation of subscription plans with unlimited voice communication - consumption there is also shifting towards the mobile Internet. This can also be seen in the advertising of cellular operators: several years ago they massively switched from promoting cheap calls to mobile Internet packages.

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