As You Like It: Where Have All the Voices Gone?

I can’t imagine my life without conversations. From the minute I wake up to the moment that I go to sleep I’m talking or listening to someone. On the phone, at work, on the train, even walking to work, there are always people to delightfully schmooze with.

My sweetest high school memories center around the talks that I had with my mom. She worked all week, came home late to make dinner, yet still sat up every night to discuss my very important life in extensive detail. I can’t understand how she stayed awake. I’m ashamed to say that when my own daughters would come to me after 10 at night to talk, if I wasn’t already asleep, I was on my way there and not at all ready to listen to their problems. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” was my late night mantra.

My dad was a great listener, but he just wasn’t comfortable with a lot of talk. And boy could I talk. I’d see my friends all day at school, but there was never enough time to get into the really good stuff. That’s what phones were for. That was back in the days before call waiting, when you couldn’t interrupt one call to take another, so you blissfully chatted on while whoever was desperately trying to reach you would listen to an exasperating busy signal.

Conversations with my friends would take hours, and my parent’s friends complained that they could never get through to us. So when I became a senior my parents finally agreed to get me my own phone line. It was a red-letter day when I could chat forever without worry. But still, the best part of the call was the moment when you picked up the phone having no idea who was on the other end, hoping that it was that cute boy from algebra, then hearing his voice say your name.

But conversations weren’t limited to the phone. I spent hours in Steve’s car, or on the subway, or in a restaurant talking to him about everything. Listening to his voice, holding his hand, watching his reaction to my ideas — it was all part of the courtship ritual. When he went off to college his phone bills were astronomical. He paid dearly for the sound of my voice.

During the years when we were separated by an ocean and phone calls were prohibitively expensive, the monthly call that we would allow ourselves was an event that was longingly anticipated and then savored for weeks. Letters were fun, but nothing could replace our voices.

I realized just how true that was when I lost Mark’s voice. His Texan drawl was as distinctive as his cowboy boots. When he died I couldn’t believe that I would never again hear him tell his corny jokes or sing, The Yellow Rose of Texas. His voice was a loss that I couldn’t bear.

I tell you all this because old-past-it person that I have become, I was alarmed when I read Linda Matchan’s Boston Globe article:

Almost everyone has a cellphone these days, yet increasingly, we use them to do everything but make calls … Recent data from Nielsen suggests Americans are heading in this direction. The average amount of time that people aged 18 to 24 spent talking on their mobile phones dropped by 17 percent between the second quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, they sent 45 percent more text messages. The trend holds up for other age groups too. The amount of time that people aged 25 to 34 talked on their phones dropped by 6 percent, while they texted 35 percent more. Texting shot up at all ages, even for those over 65.

I thought I hated cell phones because listening to one-sided conversations was so infuriating, but now I’ve found a whole new reason to fear them as well. Thanks to these little bits of plastic, a whole generation now views conversing with a person to be inefficient and annoying.

For young people, phone calls risk chance encounters. Texting eliminates that possibility. “You call people and you have to talk to their parents and go through that whole process,” said Kelsey Corrigan, 21, a writing student.

Oh my God (or I should say OMG!). You might actually risk talking to someone like a, gasp, parent! You might have to string together a few words and be polite and state your name and ask for the person you want to speak to. And if you know the parent you might have to engage in a bit of conversation. Another student, Sasha Prell, 20, said that his typical, though rare, phone conversation usually lasts under a minute, unless he’s talking to his family. “We usually just text. It’s very efficient.’’

Since when is conversation supposed to be efficient? It’s meant to be sloppy, messy, filled with emotion, excitement, discovery — just like our lives. How can you fit life into abbreviations and emoticons?

Anna Jane Grossman, author of “Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us,” claims that, “We are losing this form of conversation nobody particularly valued while it existed.’’

I would love to hear what that woman, along with anyone else who replaces human conversation with buttons, would say if they ever lost a human voice that they loved beyond written words. Suddenly those buttons would be very cold comfort indeed.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=2147

Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Nov 4 2010. Filed under As You Like It, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.