On Phones
by JS
I have a small collection of phobias that I’ve learned to live with over the years, even appreciate in an odd way as situations that confer a kind of instant adrenaline. For example, I’m bothered by heights, not airplane style heights, but railing style heights that look out over built environments of concrete and imagined pain. For example, the computer science building at Michigan has a nice atrium that provides sort of an instant hit of fear whenever I peak directly over the edge.
Another phobia is talking on the phone. This one is more complex, and to be honest, a bit more debilitating in a world that hasn’t quite transitioned to text based communication in all things. Actually, like bee stings, where one can acquire an allergy by being stung in the right sequence, talking on the phone has now gotten quite a bit worse for me. The problem is that, in this modern world, phone conversations are rare if you want them to be, and so I can’t really rely on the kind of habituation that has allowed me to come to terms with, among other things, heights.
As an example, we recently switched phone plans, which prompted my wife to check our monthly minutes usage. I had used 4 or 5 minutes that month. Yeah, I know. Statistics don’t lie.
[Aside: I'd like to meet the genius who invented the concept of "minutes", I'm imagining a kind of philosopher king out there in the business world. A wizard with power point who goes home to read Kant and Heidegger. The kind of person who has a deep infatuation with Ulysses that he can't share at the office.]
It’s not that I have a problem communicating, or at least, not really. I’m comfortable with email, texts, IM, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and all that. I’ve even developed some facility with in-person conversations. [The trick, if there is one, is to just start asking questions. Any random question will do to start.] There’s something horribly intermediate and incomplete about talking on the phone, as if the narrow range of the performance, the intimacy of producing and hearing sounds, the various different fronts that one has to maintain against the incursion of awkwardness (some technological, teleological, metaphysical, physical, psychological) are all working against you, plucking the strings of insecurity.
Then there’s the fact that somehow, over the phone, because it is intimate but not difficult, it reminds you of the web of social obligations you are no longer meeting. The genius of Facebook is in the illusion the software is able to create about one’s own commitments and obligations to the social web of friends and acquaintances. You are presented with the illusion of having friends without the hard work of being friends.
This is also why the new iPhone video chat is sort of a joke, a tool sculpted for absentee parents who want to see their kids and almost no one else. In almost all other situations the goal is to decrease the amount of real intimacy that social situations require, to turn social interactions into casual wall posts or text messages, not to up the ante with goddamn cameras. Other people have said it better. I have a somewhat harder time imagining the calculus for those who do use it to talk to their kids. I mean, if you have a high flying job that takes you away from home, how is having a piece of magic glass really going to stand in for the physicality of being there. If given the choice, wouldn’t you ditch the phone and stay home?
