The distaste for telephony is especially acute among Millennials, who have come of age in a world of AIM and texting, then gchat and iMessage, but it’s hardly limited to young people. When asked, people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are presumptuous and intrusive, especially given alternative methods of contact that don’t make unbidden demands for someone’s undivided attention. In response, some have diagnosed a kind of telephoniphobia among this set. When even initiating phone calls is a problem—and even innocuous ones, like phoning the local Thai place to order takeout—then anxiety rather than habit may be to blame: When asynchronous, textual media like email or WhatsApp allow you to intricately craft every exchange, the improvisational nature of ordinary, live conversation can feel like an unfamiliar burden. Those in power sometimes think that this unease is a defect in need of remediation, while those supposedly afflicted by it say they are actually just fine, thanks very much. [...]
But now that more than half of American adults under 35 use mobile phones as their only phones, the intrinsic unreliability of the cellular network has become internalized as a property of telephony. Even if you might have a landline on your office desk, the cellular infrastructure has conditioned us to think of phone calls as fundamentally unpredictable affairs. Of course, why single out phones? IP-based communications like IM and iMessage are subject to the same signal and routing issues as voice, after all. But because those services are asynchronous, a slow or failed message feels like less of a failure—you can just regroup and try again. When you combine the seemingly haphazard reliability of a voice call with the sense of urgency or gravity that would recommend a phone call instead of a Slack DM or an email, the risk of failure amplifies the anxiety of unfamiliarity. Telephone calls now exude untrustworthiness from their very infrastructure.[...]
Two intertwined problems arise. First, it turns out that human voices may transmit important information well above 3,300 Hz or even 5,000 Hz. The auditory neuroscientist Brian Monson has conducted substantial research on high-frequency energy perception. A widely-covered 2011 study showed that subjects could still discern communicative information well above the frequencies typically captured in telephony. Even though frequencies above 5,000 Hz are too high to transmit clear spoken language without the lower frequencies, Monson’s subjects could discern talking from singing and determine the sex of the speaker with reasonable accuracy, even when all the signal under 5,000 Hz was removed entirely. Monson’s study shows that 20th century bandwidth and sampling assumptions may already have made incorrect assumptions about how much of the range of human hearing was use for communication by voice.[...]
The Western Electric model 500 was the most popular telephone model of the 20th century, issued by Bell System and its subsidiaries from 1950 until the breakup of the Bell monopoly in 1984. It’s the phone you think of when you think of telephones, and its silhouetted handset shape remains the universal icon for “phone”—even on your iPhone’s telephone app. Like its predecessors and successors in the Bell System, the 500 was designed by Henry Dreyfuss, the mid-century industrial designer also responsible for the Honeywell T87 thermostat, the J-3 Hudson locomotive, and the Polaroid SX-70—all icons of their eras and well beyond.
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