Great article from the Washington Post last week

PHONE CALLS ARE BECOMING AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Posted Sunday, Aug. 08, 2010
BY IAN SHAPIRA
The Washington Post

Jane Beard and Jeffrey Davis didn’t realize how little they speak to their children by phone until they called AT&T to switch plans. The customer service agent was breathless. The Silver Spring, Md., couple had accumulated 28,700 unused minutes.   “None of the kids call us back! They will not call you back,” said Beard, a former actress who with her husband coaches business leaders on public speaking.  E-mail and texting have driven the telephone conversation into serious decline, creating new tensions between baby boomers and millennials — those in their teens, 20s and early 30s.

Nearly all age groups are talking on the phone less; boomers in their mid-50s and early 60s are the only ones still yakking as they did when Ma Bell was America’s communications queen. But the fall of the call is driven by 18- to 34-year-olds, whose average monthly voice minutes have plunged from about 1,200 to 900 in the past two years, according to research by Nielsen. Texting among 18- to 24-year-olds has more than doubled in the same period, from an average of 600 messages a month two years ago to more than 1,400 texts a month.

Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking or tweeting. They even say phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text.  Kevin Loker, 20, a rising junior at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., said he and his school friends rarely just call someone for fear of being seen as rude or intrusive. First, they text to make an appointment to talk. “They’ll write, ‘Can I call you at such-and-such time?’” said Loker, executive editor of Connect2Mason.com, a student media site. “People want to be polite. I feel like, in general, people my age are not as quick on their feet to just talk on the phone.”

Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University who studies how people converse in everyday life, said older generations misinterpret the way younger people use their cellphones. “One student told me that it takes her days to call her parents back and the parents thought she was intentionally putting them off,” she said. “But the parents didn’t get it. It’s the medium. With e-mails, you’re at the computer, writing a paper. With phone calls, it’s a dedicated block of time.”

Ethan Seidel, rabbi of Tifereth Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C., can’t get many of his congregants younger than 35 on the telephone. Seidel, 52, often invites young new members to his family’s home for welcome dinners, but his gesture too often doesn’t even merit return calls. “One member seemed only slightly apologetic for not returning the call,” Seidel said. “I was floored by that. They say, ‘I never answer the phone anymore.’”

People are not only making fewer calls but also having shorter conversations when they do call. The average length of a cellphone call has dropped from 2.38 minutes in 1993 to 1.81 minutes in 2009, according to industry data.  Land lines are disappearing. Verizon, the nation’s second-largest land line carrier, behind AT&T, says its hard-wired phone connections have dropped from 50 million in 2005 to 31 million this year.

Just more ammunition for the mobile marketing industry and iZigg!  Thanks to iZigg Area Agency Director Cathy McArdle for the great article.