When I was growing up in the 60’s-00’s, we all used to run to pick it up the ringing phone to say “hello.” Those days are now gone. My quest in modern times is to only get calls (and emails) from those from certain people and not from anyone else. It’s a tricky task. I do know a list of friends and family I want to hear from and I use my DND exceptions list to allow only those people to get through. But there are also those other people I want to hear from, but I don’t know who they are. They include potential new clients for my law practice, old friends and all the people in the “miscellaneous” category. My phone greeting invites all of these people to leave messages that I screen periodically and this approach works fairly well. The reason for this approach, as many of you are doubtless experiencing, is that leaving my phone wide open would result in dozens of robocalls and unwanted solicitations every day.

I was provoked to think these thoughts as I read an article on the evolution of phone usage, “Why No One Answers Their Phone Anymore: Telephone culture is disappearing.” Here’s an excerpt:

No one picks up the phone anymore. Even many businesses do everything they can to avoid picking up the phone. Of the 50 or so calls I received in the last month, I might have picked up four or five times. The reflex of answering—built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture—is gone.

Telephone exchanges of that era were what the scholar Robert Hopper described as “not quite ritual, but routine to the extent that its appearance approaches ritual.” When the phone rang, everyone knew to answer and speak in “the liturgy of the national attitude.” Now, people have forgotten how to pick up, the words, when to sing. There are many reasons for the slow erosion of this commons. The most important aspect is structural: There are simply more communication options.