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Comment by asaph | Hacker News Reader

I think we hate our telephones more than we used to and I have a theory about why. The time lag between saying something and the other person hearing it is very noticeable on cell phones as compared with landlines. This makes conversations very annoying. Person A will begin speaking and then half a second later, they'll hear Person B "interrupting". Of course Person B didn't know he was interrupting because he hadn't yet heard Person A begin to speak. Then they both stop talking, followed by some dead air. And then they both yield to one another. "No, you go ahead, please". For whatever reason, landlines seem to have lower latentency and this doesn't happen.

That and of course there are a zillion more interesting things to do on a smart phone than talk to someone.

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For me, it's that the telephone demands immediate and synchronous attention. It's the same as someone barging into your house/office, interrupting whatever it is you were doing, and demanding your attention on something entirely different.

I think this is also largely why text-based communication is so popular: it's asynchronous. You can send someone a message, they reply when it's convenient. There's very little effort involved as the recipient (compared to say, voicemail or a live conversation).

A scheduled or expected voice call is entirely different: it's just an efficient form of communication. I personally would also rather have a 5 or 10 minute phone call than send texts or e-mails back and forth dozens of times over the course of hours or days.

Huh, I never noticed the latency when talking on a mobile phone, but I also don't remember the last time I used a landline, so maybe I just forgot how much better it was.

The reason I hate the phone function of my phone is that I see calling someone as an ultimate disrespect: "I demand your attention and I demand it now, I don't care what you're doing, it will be up to you to call me back if you don't pick up the phone now!" Then I hate calling other people because I don't want to be disrespectful towards them.

Maybe it was different back when phones were a nice thing, nowadays, like someone mentioned, they usually mean trouble, annoyance or more work. Ugh.

Maybe they just want to talk to you

I hate telephones because the audio quality, even today, is bad. I can tell when I'm talking to a landline because it's so much more clear.

For some reason, it's difficult for my brain to process even a little digital noise. A modern cell phone is just about at the limit of what I can understand. It's hard for me to carry on a conversation because I've lost my hardware acceleration. I'm spending all my cycles trying to interpolate what words were said.

Literally every 10 seconds I have to say "What did you say?" It didn't used to be this way.

An interesting observation. It seems to be almost like light pollution, where we don't even know anymore how our ancestors perceived the night sky and just stopped looking up at night. Because landlines are also not what they used to be, now that everything is VoiP (even when your last mile is still analog copper).

Apparently, when our voice is passing congested packet networks, we need exponential backoff on OSI layer 8.

I hate it when it starts ringing. My phone is on silent all the time for that reason (lots of missed calls, sorry), and when I'm busy the interruptions greatly irritate me (and I'm always busy).

I have been looking for an Android app that simply turns the phone to silent when it is put face down. That way I can do that when I don't want to be disturbed.

You can set that up with Tasker pretty easily. I hadn't considered it before now but I just set mine up to go to vibrate when I flip it over.

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