David Pierce at The Wall Street Journal wants to bring back the walkie-talkie. “For many of us, the phone call over the past few years has gone the way of the telegraph and the typewriter,” he writes. “That’s not a good thing. We need voice back in our communication.”
He cites a 2016 Yale School of Management study that says communication by voice lets people assess each other’s emotions more accurately. The problems with a traditional phone call, he says, lie in the attendant complexities: you have to dial a bunch on numbers, you have to put up with the suspense of not knowing whether people you are calling will answer, and if they do, you’ll have to identify yourself (no caller ID?) and engage in some small talk before getting to the point: “Could you meet me at 6:30 at the Summer Shack?” for example.
“A three-second question—Where should we go to dinner?—requires a five-minute conversation,” Pierce writes.
His solution is to use the walkie-talkie-like function of an app like iMessage—press and hold a microphone icon, record your message, and swipe to send. Your voice message will end up interspersed with your recipient’s other messages, including text messages. “It isn’t as real-time as a phone call,” Pierce writes, “but it doesn’t demand your full and undivided attention, either.”
I have some issues with this. Even if the Yale study is accurate, I don’t really need to assess the emotions of someone when trying to set up a time and place to meet for dinner. If an emotional assessment is necessary, dinner would seem to offer a fine opportunity to do the assessing.
And as several readers commenting on Pierce’s article point out, few are mourning the demise of Nextel and its cellphone walkie-talkie feature. (Pierce’s article includes an archived Nextel commercial touting the feature.) Yet another points out that there’s a reason people pay their carriers extra to convert voice messages to text.
I think I agree with Joanna Stern on this one, who previously wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “It’s time for voicemail to die.” If you want to leave a message, send a text or email.
This position seems to have some support. It has been reported that two-thirds of Americans have stopped listening to voicemail. It’s unclear to me why the walkie-talkie messages Pierce advocates would be any more popular.
Of course, there will always be situations requiring hands-free communications, and voice offers an alternative. And if you don’t have a strong preference, you can try to accommodate the preferences of those you are trying to communicate with—although you may need an app to keep track of that.