In OppositionSara Mesa’s latest book, sounds like an official being prosecuted because he accelerated citizens’ efforts by communicating with them by phone. This saved many complicated procedures which, despite some fictitious details, are recognizable to any reader accustomed to dealing with public administrations. Despite his good intentions, that character is punished for using calls to buy time and something similar happens to K, the protagonist of The Castlewhen he tries to use the phones at his inn to get clarification on his confusing surveying job. Although Mesa’s novel revolves around complex protocols and services online and in Kafka’s (written a century earlier), K. still resorts to messengers on horseback, in both the telephone, with its immediacy, represents a possible intelligent and rapid solution to the communication problems that two ineffective and deaf institutions refuse to solve.
It happens to us every day too: a WhatsApp conversation gets tangled, e-mail refer to others e-mail lost in an infinite thread and a small decision – no matter whether work-related or where to have dinner that evening – is never made because it depends on too many gestures (taking out your mobile phone, making scrollwrite a new message…) and wait (how long does it take each interlocutor to do all this). So, suddenly, someone says: “I’ll call you” and in a few seconds of synchronized conversation the issue is resolved.
“We receive so many messages that the call, which forces synchronicity, once again becomes in some cases the fastest and most effective means for our hectic lives”
The calls refuse to disappear. In a world dominated by the circulation of images and full of messaging services (WhatsApp, Telegram, Teams chats or private Instagram ones) the minutes of telephone conversation per line, however, have remained almost constant since 2020 (when, with Covid, they recovered). After much reflection on the terror that a phone call generates between them millennialsit seems that they too are giving up and returning to using them when they need an immediate response and cannot afford to send or receive long audio messages. Naturally the philosopher Anna Pagès, author of A voice remains: from silence to wordswarns ICON: these hasty, short, moving calls allow us to receive a message and hear what the other person is telling us, but not hear his voice, that is, his presence.
What matters is the voice and the text does not
Until 2020, 2008 had been the year when most people spoke on the phone in Spain. That moment marked a turning point because from then on data speeds were extended and instant messaging replaced many calls. This data appears in the following Economic reports on telecommunications published by CNMCwhich also reflect that, with the confinement, that record was broken again (we spent 140 billion minutes on the phone) and that, since then, the numbers have decreased slightly, but continue to exceed those of 2019.
“In my work, in the publishing field, calls are the most immediate tool. Even though one might assume that we use email more, everything important always happens by telephone,” says Andrea Bescós, editor of the Grupo Planeta label. “The call is not only more practical, but also reinforces the human aspect, which is something we sometimes forget when we turn off small fires on autopilot. Emails and WhatsApp messages often become a tangle of clarifications, doubts, knowing what everyone has understood… And the call resolves in a few minutes what can take days with emails,” he adds.
Recent studies confirm this Humans convey a virtually constant amount of information per minute when speaking any language. Although the standard reading speed (about 250 words per minute) is faster than our ability to vocalize (about 150 words per minute), the amount of information contained in sixty seconds of conversation will always be greater than that obtained during one minute of reading, even if the latter covers more words. The linguist and researcher Santiago García explains it: “From phonetics we know that speech is not composed only of isolated sounds (the so-called phonemes AND allophonesvowels and consonants), but also of a set of phenomena that accompany and transform them (i suprasegmental elements OR prosodic). The latter include the accent, tone, intonation, rhythm, pauses, duration, speed or quality of the voice and, thanks to them, the voice implicitly transmits an enormous amount of linguistic and extralinguistic information that guides the listener’s interpretation and which, in a written message, could only be reproduced by a much longer and less natural text.
“There is no more truth in spoken discourse, but there is more life, more sighs, more breath or more eloquent silences”
If, according to McLuhan’s famous maxim, “the medium is the message”, these technological and linguistic conditions of telephone calls compared to text messages can also influence the type of contents we transmit through them and the way in which we interpret them. “The German linguists Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher underlined this oralityprototypically located at the pole of the communicative immediacyis characterized by less planning and its ephemeral nature,” continues García. “While the scripturalitylinked to the pole of communicative distanceit usually involves a lot of planning and a more lasting and definitive character. It is thus understood that what we say when we speak tends to be perceived as more authentic, direct and sincere than what we express in writing.”
“There is no more truth in spoken conversation, but there is more life, more sighs, more breath or more eloquent silences,” he adds. Pages, which in a voice remains He indicated that there is “an element in the voice that cannot be written and that breaks the all-encompassing desire of linguistic disciplines, dedicated to capturing sound in the form of letters.” The philosopher and professor comments that this distinction between voice and language is the work of Giorgio Agamben, a theorist who provides clues to analyze the distance between the robotic voice that simply transmits a message and one’s real voice. Pagès insists that what we habitually exchange in audio messages or accelerated calls is information, but not our real voices: “Sometimes we recognize the voice of another by how he separates words, by how he whispers sentences or by the way of remaining silent. What is the difference between a voice message from a robot and the voice of a friend? By the timbre, by the tone, by the rhythm, we recognize another singular. Instead, the voice of the robot gives information and he says (offers slogan) but no he tells us (does not challenge or move). There is a voice that can be heard, like in WhatsApp voice messages, and a voice that can be read beyond what is said. The voice points to a specific body whose presence a recording cannot explain.”
Alarm requires a busy world
Even if he spam telephone It is one of the most rejected business practices from consumers, Instagram is full of businessmen and telephone sales gurus who argue that cold calling is still a good way to do business. dozens of influencers They record themselves calling customers from their offices and show off their supposed ability to persuade them with enthusiasm and mischief. Regardless of the effectiveness of this strategy, it seems that, after years of refusal, a couple of younger generations (the audience consuming those coils) thinks twice about picking up the phone, at least when it comes to work environments.
Perhaps this is why Pagès recalls that, among students, there still exists an enormous “aversion to the call” (“listening to the voice of the other, who speaks to you and asks you to respond in real time, is something difficult and intimidating for them”); while Bescós verified that “things change when generations cross paths and we have to work with an who prospers which may not be solved using a canvas oh Excelbut it solves problems more immediately and transforms everything into something more human.”
So the fear of the phone is a generational issue that disappears over the years: “The aversion to calls has a lot to do with the fear of immediate exposure. The call does not allow you to change or control the image you project, and the generation millennial she was very used to carefully constructing herself online“, continues Bescós. “I have met many people in the workplace who had to mentally prepare themselves before calling. But this is changing, because with the habit of notifying before calling, the call is no longer invasive, which was the fundamental reason why younger generations did not use it,” concludes the editor.
Yes, according to philosophers like Hartmut Rosa, novelists like Juan Tallón (which he just published A thousand things, a work that ends with an anguished call) and essayists like Sergio C. Fanjul, the lack of time It is the phenomenon that most agitates our life today, the telephone conversation has become an unexpected ally to continue to accelerate. As the linguist García summarizes and concludes: “The new phone call is shorter and more effective: it serves to resolve in two minutes what in writing could involve twenty poorly understood messages. This use of the voice responds, in part, to a textual saturation: we receive so many messages that the call, which requires synchronicity, is once again in some cases the fastest and most effective means for our hectic lives.” Because you can ignore an email for days or wait for a quiet moment that never comes to open one of those multi-minute audios that are also trendy. But, once answered, you need to answer.
