I hover near a generation in which long and pointless phone calls to the friends you’d spent all day with was an essential post-school afternoon ritual. Every minute was itemised, every telling-off for the small fortune this was costing, accounted for on the quarterly bill. Later, in my first taste of work as an intern at this paper, I was able to learn how journalists did their jobs because they were talking on the phone and to each other all day. Five years later, I was working at a start-up where real talk was at a minimum: conversations had migrated to the late, great MSN Messenger. Typing your talk officially took over.
Now, the idea of ringing someone for “a chat” has a quaint, retro quality. I can, and will, talk you under the table, but phone calls are a luxury usually reserved for about five people: my mum, my sister, two best friends and my editor, obviously. Even then, I’m rubbish at picking up.
Much is made about smartphones leading to dumber conversation – amid claims that the art of chatter has been lost. Arguably, however, conversation has simply been rebooted and reconfigured. Take the myriad ways in which we can and do communicate now. It’s a given that I will spend an embarrassing portion of my day glued to a screen (it’s work!) and much of that will be chatting (again, it’s work!).
Unlike most people I know, I don’t use WhatsApp for one-on-one conversations (the “two blue ticks” confirming that someone has opened and read your message allows for too much anxiety) but I think it’s the best way to conduct group chats: the family thread, your best friends, the meme crew, and the splinter cells set up around someone’s birthday drinks. It’s here that modern comms can be richer, and smooth out awkward conversational lags and silences: the speed of a group chat, the ability to send pictures, links, songs, videos and emojis – emojis! – shouldn’t be sniffed at.
My parents aren’t texters and my cousins in Pakistan prefer to write in phonetic Urdu; I maintain that the emoji is the most universal and democratic form of communication. No, a winky smiley face love heart kiss unicorn fish can’t replace a meaningful conversation with my dad about my bathroom pipes, but a bit of daily WhatsApp contact – a Good Morning! meme from him, 43 emojis from my niece – keeps us connected when time and life don’t allow for a Big Catchup Call.
There’s more: texting, for proper, considered, well-punctuated missives; iMessage for barely legible babble on my iPhone; GChat on Gmail for day-long office inanity; Facebook for lurking on other people’s conversations; Twitter for lurking on other people’s opinions, and Snapchat for pretending I’m in a demographic attractive to advertisers.
Talk isn’t dead. It’s just presented in ways that are to the point, quicker and easier to articulate. What we lose in tone we make up for in emoji.
