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Comment by saber6 | Hacker News Reader

As a 33 year old I really am confused by this statement.

While I love my texting, slack, etc, nothing replaces the low-latency engagement (intimacy) of a one on one phone call. I can parse someone's tone very easily on a phone call. Text rarely conveys such depth.

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I struggle with phone calls. I find them quite anxiety inducing with anyone who I don't know well. I think because I find it hard to read tone of voice accurately, and to control my tone of voice to accurately convey my emotions.

I generally much prefer in person contact. And messaging to arrange it.

Also: not sure if you are young enough to be in the MSN generation? But a good chunk of my generation (I'm 26), grew up spending every evening conversing via text for a chunk of our teenage years. We got pretty good at conveying emotion through text (using longggg words... elipsis for pauses, emojis, and idioms (lol, lmao, AF), etc)

I'm also 26, and I definitely relate to the teenage IM experience. I think the problem with phone calls is that it's an unnatural level of focus to give someone you don't know well. when you meet face-to-face, there's always some little distractions available to fill the gaps in the conversation. silence is way worse without context; after fifteen seconds or so, the other person will say "hey, are you still there?" I also find myself missing one word out of every other sentence the person says, so there's a lot of backtracking.

as an aside, I've noticed that my cohort of people who grew up sending hundreds of messages/texts to their friends every night don't really interact that way anymore over text. back then if the person was online, they would usually respond immediately and you could exchange a lot of information really fast. now every response seems to take a few minutes or an hour (I do this myself too, don't mean to blame anyone). it has the weird effect of making text a less useful way to communicate than it was ten or fifteen years ago. I guess when everything is immediate and urgent, nothing is?

> as an aside, I've noticed that my cohort of people who grew up sending hundreds of messages/texts to their friends every night don't really interact that way anymore over text.

Yeah, same here. Don't have time for that anymore! I also have the freedom to go an see people in person in a way that I didn't back then (well not currently, but most of the time!).

It's even worse for me if I know the person.

Yeah, I'm only a couple of years younger than you and I feel the opposite. I'm always trying so hard to parse the words and meaning, that I easily miss the sentiment of spoken words.

It's one of those things that I realize is probably just on my end though. I've had speech issues since I was a kid and am technically on the autism spectrum. I've learned enough by now so that most people wouldn't guess either of things - but real-time streaming audio processing is one of the few things I just can't learn or accommodate for. It's like I'm always 3 seconds behind in understanding what was just said. Often, I can even recite back what was said to me before I can parse it. I'm surprisingly fine at highly technical conversations / phone troubleshooting though - because it's easier to anticipate the path of the conversation and sentiment isn't usually a factor. Taking tons of notes helps too.

From my experience, text can absolutely convey a significant degree of intimacy - but it takes a great deal of practice to do so fluidly. There is some latency - but the trade-off works to my benefit since I don't have much more latency than my peers on average.

>nothing replaces the low-latency engagement (intimacy) of a one on one phone call.

For a lot of people, texting absolutely does replace the intimacy of a phone call. I have an ex-girlfriend who almost never talked to me on the phone, and only wanted to text, and she was like this with all her friends too. Note the "ex-" part here...

Phone calls are just terrible when you try to convey complex information. Just recently had that issue with a business deal where it only became clear that we were not on the same page w.r.t. some important details after I put things into writing after an IRL meeting and several follow-up calls. The lesson from this is always to follow up with a summary e-mail, and to avoid anything more complex than a simple yes/no or maybe arranging a time and date by telephone.

Depends on what info I need. For most colleagues I'll just need some quick non-emotional information to do my job. Calling them up just takes up time.

Same goes for clients calling about an issue and trying to stay on the line while I fix it. It's just inconvenient in that context.

Hearing someone is great when I need to discuss some opinions. Or when you really need live interaction.

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