No Voice, All Data

During my college days, there used to magazines like Voice & Data. Today, everything is Data. Thanks to the rise of the smartphone, the purpose of the phone has changed, as Thomas Ricker wrote in this awesome article:

“With the invention of smartphones, the "phone" is just another communications app. One that is quickly being demoted from the favorites bar. Hell, most modern phone reviews don’t even bother discussing call reception.”

Ian Bogost wrote this great article on why this transition happened: it’s not just a social phenomenon, it’s also technological! Mobile, being wireless, meant that “signal strength, traffic, and interference can make calls difficult or impossible”. We have come to accept that to a point where “phone calls (are) synonymous with unreliability”! In that unreliable world came all the messaging apps: being “asynchronous, a slow or failed message feels like less of a failure”, says Bogost.

Then there’s the historical choice that telecom companies made in the landline era: only voice signals in the 300 to 3,400 Hz range were carried over the line. A perfectly fine choice when you’d be talking on the landline in “predictable environments: a bedroom, a kitchen, an office”. But not such a good choice for today when we talk in noisy environments: “coffee shops, restaurants, city streets, and so forth”. The combination of the small range of frequencies picked in the landline era with background noise means you can’t hear all that well.

The next “culprit” is the industrial design of the smartphone: being larger than the regular Nokia type candy bar phone, it had to be redesigned to be “carried first, and spoken into second”. That new rectangular, flat design though is “awful for talking”. Why?

“The tiny microphones and speakers on these phones are designed to disappear into their casings rather than to allow sound to be directed out.”

Contrast that design with how the landline handset is designed:

“The speaker covers the ear almost completely, its punctured concave chamber allowing the head and ear to move in relation to the handset without compromising the sound’s pathway to the ear. And on the speaking side, you might be surprised to remember that your mouth presses up directly against the (phone’s) microphone enclosure.”

The experience too has changed: the landline handset’s intimacy came from the “tactile sensuality” of the handset, “the time-consuming process of shwk-whirrrr dialing” and the “sound of the dial tone initiating the invitation to dial”. For the smartphone, that intimacy comes from touching the screen!

All of the above is probably why typing has replaced talking as the way to communicate on the smartphone.