Why do we text instead of talk?

BBC-podcast on suurin edes koko koko. Yhteis hyvä ruokas oveluksista. Elämä on ruoka. Äs margat. Koko on ruoka. Koko on ruoka. Koko on ruoka. Koko on ruoka. Koko on ruoka. ed workflow ja去allat,imiin takaluissa, koska rattiaan voi olla joutulla kaikkia, joten se teelliselys Symon Please understand their intention. Katsopoお願いします? - Ei k experience,ustにすinky kape Beauty Plancin testosterone! Caneakin vai governance, antavaa sisällää myössä Sinne, että anxious fragrantasia on kuin puntaja jotka pystytsisirtaikainen, takau어가 skipistipuose núduuinen ferta. Sophie Scott, is the director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. - When we're speaking we don't only produce words. So when I'm talking to you, you can get a lot of information about me in addition to the words that I'm saying, you can tell if I'm male or female, you can tell if I'm an adult and probably have a good rough guess at my age, you can have a good guess at my health, my mood, my socioeconomic status, my geographical origins, the things that seem obvious when you're listening to somebody speaking, we always speak with melody and intonation to our voice and we'll change our meaning depending on that. You take that channel of information out of communication, you lose another way that sense is being conveyed. Over time, we've conjured up various devices to try and inject emotion back into our written texts. The emoticon, those faces we type with various bits of punctuation, is short for emotional icon. And then there are emojis, characters of all kinds, which have newly become a language of their own, one with a subtext of sarcasm, which doesn't always translate smoothly across the generations. One of the problems being an older person trying to engage with this, completely misusing emojis because you don't quite pick up on how people use them. So there's a crying face emoji that people use that means like I'm laughing so much, it's making me cry or I'm crying, but it's funny. And I've seen people use that in a way that means this is terrible news. I thought so with the people who've been killed in this horrible earthquake, crying face emoji on Twitter and you're like, that's a smart thing, I think that's wrong. So I find I tend to just not use them because I'm fairly certain I'll get them wrong. I know I've got them wrong because I sent my daughter once in the emoji where there's blowing a kiss and she said, "Mom, never ever send me that emoji again." I don't know, I need your mom, figure it out. Nice. How can this be wrong? A nice kiss, thank you, that'd be wrong, yeah. I'm still not sure what I got wrong with that one. became the most widely used mobile data service. That year, approximately 700 billion text messages were sent in China alone. WhatsApp found us in 2009. Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and WeChat came along two years later. These applications made it much more convenient to talk with a group of people quickly and easily. Perhaps too easily. A lot of my students don't want to come to office hours. They just want to text me. And I say, "No, you have to come and I'll buy you lunch." I'll have beautiful sandwiches, but you have to come to office hours. I have to talk to you. You don't really have to bribe your students with food to get them to come and have a conversation with you, do you? I'm not beyond it. The fantasy of why people want to stay on screens is that you'll type the perfect comment and the other person will type the perfect comment back and you will each have the fantasy that everybody's perfect. There's an assault on empathy, which I see certainly when I study teenagers, but also young people. They've lost some of the skills of how to communicate with each other, which does involve being vulnerable in ways that you don't have to be vulnerable if you're used to talking on screens. In the late 70s, the American phone company Bell had a commercial with this tagline. The aim was to get people to pick up the phone more often to talk with the people they know and love. It's not a slogan which travels well over time and doesn't take into account how out of practice many of us have become with using our phones to talk. As far back as 2012, a European telecoms company reported that making calls was only the fifth most popular application on our smartphones. Talking on the phone is skill. It has a lot in common with public speaking. And for certain generations, we picked up those skills automatically because there were so many people around us talking on the phone. But since we have been talking with our thumbs, which goes back to about 2007, we have all lost some of our phone communication skills. Mary Jane Cops is the phone lady or rather she owns a company by that name in Nova Scotia Canada. Times hire her to coach employees who have lost or maybe never had the confidence to definitely deal with the phone calls that their jobs demand. I had one client whose employer called me because she was crying every day and was on her way to get up anti-anxiety medication from her physician so that she could do her job and her job involved in bound calls. She wasn't making out bound calls but when that phone rang, she was incredibly distressed. She would always let it go to voicemail but that slowed the process of the results that she was getting for the company. Why was she that frightened to pick up the telephone? Probably the same reason you and I get frightened in life. It was the unknown. Oh hi Nicole. It's Sandra Cunthorff from the BBC. Hi how are you? I'm fine thank you. How are you? I'm good thank. Gosh you picked up the phone a bit more quickly than I expected you to. Nicole Balter is an account manager at a company in Halifax Nova Scotia and the client Mary Jane Cops was referring to. When we spoke she seemed much more comfortable talking over the phone than she would have been in the past but then I did text her beforehand so she knew I'd be calling. I've always kind of had like a negative connotation with being on the phone with strangers. It kind of started actually when I moved out of my family's home and I had to start making phone calls for myself so like making appointments I would always get really anxious about that. And then I started a job where my job was to answer the phone and it became so overwhelming that I had to quit the job. What was it about making phone calls that got you so distressed? I think it was a lot of not knowing what to say. I wasn't confident in what I was either selling or in my self-ingiving correct answers. I wouldn't consider myself a salesperson. It doesn't come naturally to me but I would be put in a role where I had to sell something and so I would kind of get into my head and say I can't do this. Why am I doing this? And then it would just throw my entire call off. And sometimes I would even cry thinking about having to make calls. But now it's definitely a lot more calming knowing the tips and stuff that she taught me. And what was it that Mary Jane taught you that made the phone less frightening? A lot of it was a lot of self-confidence and she taught me little tips. The other person on the other line is probably just as nervous as you are. Just taking time to think about what it is that they're asking of you and just like breathe. It's still stressful a little bit. I can't know if I'll fully ever get over that. But I do try to get on the phone more often than I used to. I am not someone who says you shouldn't email or you shouldn't text. It's amazing. The technology has given us new ways to stay connected and build community and be together online or otherwise. But each of the mediums has a role to play. But here's my thought about the future of phone communication because I get asked this a lot and I'll admit that five or seven years ago I worried about the future of my company. I thought, oh my goodness, what if we really are going to stop talking on the phone? And where I've come to is the fact that phone conversations are always going to be part of our lives. People will still need to talk to each other. But if the skill to talk on the phone is not passed down to other generations, we're going to end up with people who can't ever have the careers they should have because they don't have the necessary communication skills. Perhaps another task which will one day be mastered by eloquent machines. But how would a machine handle the tact required when more than one person is vying for your undivided attention? Would they do it more gracefully than we humans often do? If you speak to someone in person and they don't respond right away, that would be rude. But you might be speaking to someone in person and someone text you and it would be rude for you then to stop that conversation and speak to the person over text. Yet the person on the other side of the text is getting an audience responded right away. It's like we're constantly now creating these situations using our phones that allow us to tread on minds. No matter what you do, we're going to disappoint people because we're trying to communicate in so many different ways. Do you prioritize the person on the phone or do you prioritize the person you're speaking to? Who do you disappoint first? You're going to disappoint somebody. So my name is Chetan Deshpandey. So I'm doing digital marketing consulting here in India. Okay, you can't be typing while we're doing this. I can hear the keyboard. Yeah. Yeah. Are you done? Yeah, I'm done. Okay, so let's start again. Can you give me your name and your title, please? Yeah. So my name is Chetan Deshpandey and I'm doing digital marketing consulting in India. Chetan Deshpandey's job is to help companies grow by understanding the changes new technologies are bringing to the country. And once I got his full attention, I asked him if he thought that texting was becoming the preferred method of communication in India. Absolutely. Even everyone, it's not only about youngsters, but everyone who is using internet messengers like WhatsApp or Facebook messengers, they are definitely texting more than calling. And this is true not just with Chetan's clients. He can see changes happening in his own family. But with my family, if you consider that people today are sending the invitations normally in India, people used to go to everyone's phone and invite for a birthday or if there's a wedding or if there is any family function. Normally the ritual was even seniors used to visit people to give the physical invites. But nowadays it's really normal that people can send some well-designed graphics over WhatsApp. For even maddened invitations. But texts don't have to be just a quick form of contact. They also have the potential to prompt us towards behaviors which are in our best interest, though we may not realise it. Tax musters can be an incredibly helpful way to cut through a lot of noise and just remind you what to do when. Elspith Kirkman is a senior director at the Behavioral Insights team in the UK, also known as the Nudge Unit. They try to design small interventions which can prompt people to make better choices in their everyday lives. Elspith runs their work on health, education and communities. So I studied at Iran around five years ago with people looking for work. He was going through government unemployment services and they had quite a lot of opportunities to attend these very high impact recruitment events. working so a helpingupwl yn a gyrch�us bobfa y lle hynnedu a 100 yolkdeau. Born pat i f система di amateur i card raidydd fan yno funes flodaid a i gadw gyd Drogech i mai cableol eraill gyddi callul a novelul spreading fo a gwrsleben rams ni rain i'n llyn diol charwch amdu inviting o'r tituli yn my fuelri I'm a'u y pwelo feldes— refresol ym yr ymdyn ligad ant yn gwneud Dyna. nu'r coel feldaethau fatu wedi'n siwl ddim wedi ymdol owinastor Eraidaw Folkau, ac rwy'n new 있��ylaniaeth writing David Cris Smooth. Mae'r ddim entyddai i nai'r y tuf Girfodd ddiol Sierra Ewalgos bod y Bordair Dynast 3 a Franc birlikte o sgryzeneddau nad y bar totalegberio gyda'i Greynal ну am ytyrnedd sydd ie rhblwyn ers ar y fforddayaol ychyd. "Ti'n gweithio yn gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio" "Ti'n gweithio'r gweithio" "Ti'n gweithio'r gweithio" Gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r 'Rumefael' yśu'r gweithio'r 'Rumefael' yśu'r 'Rumefael' yśu'r gweithio'r 'Rumefael' yśu'r 'Rumefael' yśu'r 'Rumefael' yśu'r 'Rumefael' yśu'r 'Rumefael' yśu. oed yn ffllarf yw, a'r gyda'r sgweithio i'r fod yn pwyshau, oeddwn i'r braneol yn chun yn. So, there's something of that effect which is going on with personalisation, i'r messages. So, just adding my name 'Hail's Birth' really helps cut through the noise of all of the other stuff that your phone's telling you, it makes it feel like it's intended for you. But the benefits of this tactic are likely to wear off if everyone starts texting us as if they were our best friend. One of the things we know in behavioural science is that short-term behaviour changes relatively straightforward. You can get someone to do something once, but her bituation is much more difficult and we can get an ear to those sorts of tactics very quickly. So, if every single company that's texting me or government agency or whatever it is starts saying 'Hail's Birth' I'm probably going to learn to tune that stuff out because my brain is not just my brain, all brains are incredibly effective spam filters. It seems pretty obvious that the words we type to one another are crowding out conversations we could be having. This may be a good thing if you don't enjoy speaking on the phone, but the poet Gary Turk wonders if it really just allows us to skim over relationships we now keep at arms length. In a way, phones don't just change what we do, they change who we are. And I think by texting people all the time you feel like you're connecting to someone but you're not your fervor apart because you feel like 'Oh, I've caught up with them recently because I sent them a text' and before you realise you've not actually seen this person in a few months but you feel like 'Oh, I talked to them all the time, it's fine'. It's not just about, you know, because you're looking at your phone, you're not seeing what's going on. There's things in communication that you miss out on. The epigraph to the classic EMForster novel 'Howards End' reads 'Only Connect'. It's a story which explores our craving for human connection, though the book is more than a hundred years old that need hasn't changed even though the tools we use to fulfil it have. Are we making the best use of these devices? Or are they stripping something away from us? To text or to talk? A question to ask yourself the next time you pick up your phone. You've been listening to the Y Factor on the BBC World Service. This programme was produced and presented by me, Sandra Canthal, it's been mixed by Neil Churchill and the editor is Andrew Smith. The Compass is the podcast from the BBC World Service that really gets under the skin of a story. I can tell you what I believe is not the truth and you know it's not the truth and now get away with it. So I will tell you. With series that take an in-depth look at how the world today really works. Sometimes I think that we are moving into the right direction and changes happening and then I realise that nine to ten women get killed every day in this country so I don't feel we're moving forward at all. And why things are the way they are. I have been socialised to be a soldier, to be someone aggressive and even to dominate especially women or other people. So I have this kind of fear that, if I one day become a violent person. 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