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Talk to Me, Baby!


talk to me.JPGJust in case you were looking for another generational bone of contention between baby boomers and millennials, here it is: the common telephone.

Cell phone, smartphone or landline, most age groups are spending a lot less time yakking into a handset. Two years ago, 18- to 34-year-olds spent 1,200 minutes a month speaking into a phone, according to a Nielsen study. Now they spend just 900. Texting has more than doubled in that time period, from 600 messages a month to 1,400.

So what? you say. Well, baby boomers still rely heavily on the phone and consider it rude when their kids refuse to call them back and actually talk. Younger generations, though, now consider unscheduled, long phone calls rude, since stopping everything to talk is a huge interruption in a busy, often overcommitted day. A text is feels much less disruptive.

Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen studies people’s communication methods in everyday life, and she says older generations frequently misinterpret the way younger people use cell phones. She told The Washington Post writer Ian Shapira, “One student told me that it takes her days to call her parents back and the parents thought she was intentionally putting them off. But the parents didn’t get it. It’s the medium. With e-mails, you’re at the computer, writing a paper. With phone calls, it’s a dedicated block of time.”

But Tannen also added that students’ dwindling verbal communication seems to bring us one step closer to the  New Yorker magazine cartoon, in which one man tells another, “I used to call people, then I got into e-mailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone.”

Naomi Baron, an American University linguistics professor who has studied Americans’ use of mobile devices, agrees. She says, “In a very profound way, our lives changed when the remote control was first introduced. You didn’t have to watch what you didn’t want to watch.”

Now we can seemingly flip through people we don’t want to speak to just like all the TV channels we wish didn’t come with our cable package. More alarming, though, that looks to be a lot of people. “Here’s the issue,” Baron says. “We don’t want to talk to each other most of the time.”

I can only wonder why. Is speaking by phone or in face-to-face conversation too emotionally taxing? Too “confrontational?” Are we gradually becoming a society that avoids open, off-the-cuff communication in favor of cautiously calibrating every word we speak? We seem to be afraid of rattling off a thought and risking appearing … gasp … human.