Phone calls are dying. The art of conversation may not be far behind

This was a dominant fixture in the house where I was raised up. Black and angulate, cord of brown fabric, located in the corner near the front door. On the rare and alarming occasions when it rang, there was an inflexible formula for answering: They waited a moment for the other line to respond and then the operator asked calmly ‘Sittingbourne 981, who is speaking, please?’ 
 
The phone both was and wasn’t an instrument of communication at the same time. Like aspirin, the situations in which it could be taken were well defined- and casual conversations was not one of them. That it was located in the chilly front hall, from where each uttered word could be heard all around the house, was a most effective remedy for the almost interminable talk that is (or was) the besetting sin of youth. 
 
When the mobile phones were introduced in the society, I bought one as expected of every responsible citizen. It was an unwieldy object: too cumbersome to be easily portable, it was neither as sturdy as the proper house phone, which I never personally owned but which now seems to embody an essentially optimistic age, nor as charged with future as the mobile – an emblem of get-rich-quick,-dot-com fantasies that imploded at the start of the new millennium. The beeper, the answered phone, that certain tone, the blinking red light may signal a business appointment, a trip, the start or finish of a romance – or, even once, a dying. 
 
The advent of more sophisticated mobiles did not entirely detach us from our landlines: using Ofcom data, this paper noted that in 2009 84 per cent of the households possessed a home phone. Last year, the proportion was at 54% of itself, it has even reduced to 47% the latest being that BT wants to replace the analogue network with the digital network. 
 
Situations evolve and so does the message from the advocates of digital technology and innovationhub that we must evolve with the situations. To some extent this is quite a rational proposition. I can use my smartphone to find the way from one place to another figure out information about some unknown painter of the 19th century or some symptom of diseases. Now, the number of apps has grown and counted more than 3 millions. They are portable encyclopedias in my pocket More formally, such devices are portable knowledge repositories. 
 
However as a mean of communication, which is the primary use of a telephone my Smartphone sucks. These days, the prim phone etiquette of my childhood has given way to the ubiquitous plaintive cry: “Hi, do you have access to visuals and can you hear me?” 
 
When planning to relocate to my new house, in a village that is at most 50miles away from the capital was surprised to find out that there was no phone signal at all. In the distinctly analogue ten days that it took for broadband to be connected, I found myself lurking in the shrubbery (the only place where there was a bar of signal), trying to have conversations with a vet about life-or-death surgery on a beloved animal: “Nephrosplenetic entrapment… GA or laparoscopy… PTS on the table… Are you there?” 
 
It was a situation that was at the same funny in its way and yet dead serious in its chronically ending in stalemate. I eventually realised the reason people of my son’s age avoid phone calls and prefer messaging, social media and voice messages. Those media are beneficial and alluring, and they allow the forms of international friendship that Sir Thomas More and, for example, his favorite Dutch friend Erasmus could comprehend, even despite the fact that their correspondence was, most likely, less emoji-intensive. 
 
But even before the starting of the telecommunication, printing or writing simply speaking was the most basic way of human communication. More specifically, express speaking such as over the phone or, worse, face to face is tiring since it requires an ability to listen – a seemingly redundant virtue in the current world. 
 
However, the acoustic environment and especially the human voice is the most basic of the fundamentals. Whole chunks of 20th-century women’s-fiction – those tomes where the lady of the house languishes at home waiting for a telephone call that she hopes will finally ignite her stagnant life – will not make much sense to the present-day readers. Does it matter? Given the contemporary agenda of humanities where the poetic treats itself to both diatribe and self-absorption – yes, the (in)capacity to conduct a phone conversation undoubtedly counts for quite a lot. 
 
Full of beans 
 
Hannibal Lecter ate them with a nice Chianti and the liver of one of his victims, while the Oxford Companion to Food says that “they” have caused superstitious horror. However, the future might be slightly brighter for Vicia faba. A Cambridge researcher named Nadia Mohd-Radzman has set herself an agenda to get people to embrace the broad bean on the basis of the fact that it has qualities that enhances joy. 
 
Gray-blue broad beans that are fried with butter and ham strips taste quite good and are supposedly full of levo-dopa, which counteracts anhedonia or joy deficiency, which has become the present-day zeitgeist. I was not surprised Hannibal Lecter looked and seemed so cheerful.