In my physical mailbox, 99% of parcels are something I want that I ordered, and 97% of letters are spam or bills. Naturally my feelings and enthusiasm on finding them reflect this, even before opening them: my response to the medium is due to the message correlated with it.

It seems plausible to me that some people would have learned similar correlations between chat notifications vs ringtones.

I'm 40 and hate making and receiving voice calls.

First things first: Everyone hears your end of the conversation with a voice call. I absolutely hate that: My family would pick up pieces (by accident or not) and when my ex's mental illness was worse, he would listen. Period.

But there are also other things: I can flush the toilet. I don't have to do as many "formalities" and I don't have to stop everything I'm doing to have a conversation with someone.

I figure communication goes on a sliding scale of intrusiveness. Video is the most intrusive (I don't know why old sci-fi wanted this!)... and text the least.

I find discussions over text long winded and can often be discussed more thoroughly with a simple phone call. I'm with you on video chats, although while I was living overseas for a number of years my mother insisted on it, which was fine. But I don't take phone calls when I'm surrounded by people, I'll head outside or into the corridor.

I personally just prefer phone calls for any proper conversations, the odd "hello, how are you doing?" type messages are fine with text but if I actually want to talk to someone, phone calls every time.

Depends on the correspondent, but many messages can be resolved quickly via text, while phone conversations tend to get more easily waylaid.

People who prefer to create drama or interminable conversations can and do do so via any medium.

>Texting requires far more effort and takes far more time.

A reasonable theory would be that if your typing skills are good enough, the opposite is true.

It's less the speed of typing but the continual back and forth of texting and the delay between messages. You send a message, you get a reply - sometimes later on in the day and you don't want to be that guy by hassling the recipient of your text messages by keep nudging them.

Example, today on the train I texted a mate to see if he was about as we'd previously discussed meeting up today. I was going to get off the train at a particular stop if I was going to see him but otherwise would have carried on. I texted him and didn't get a reply until just before I was going to get off the train, which was about 40 minutes later. If I'd just given him a phone call, I'd have known immediately. It was all fine in the end but if I hadn't received his text before the first stop, I'd have continued on my way assuming he was busy. But because now the default method of communication is text messaging, I feel I can't make a phone call any more.

Especially if you're "texting" from a computer (iMessage linked to a phone, for example)

Those are rare skills. The optimum is texting via voice recog

I'd rather talk to people, too. I'm not even young, I'm 43 years old and I grew up running into the kitchen to answer every phone call before anyone else could grab it. These days the phone is so useless that I only get to talk to people face to face. Part of the problem is the spam and part of the problem is the voice quality. If you are my age you remember when phone calls actually sounded OK and phone companies competed on call quality ("you can hear a pin drop"). Now every phone call is a battle between your ears, some horrible vocoder, and 99% packet loss. Not enjoyable at all.

I generally dislike voice calls because they take me out of what I was doing and require my attention during the call.

Voice calls are useful for things that need to be dealt with quickly but otherwise async communication is much more pleasant.

Yup.

A voice call means they need my attention RIGHT NOW. (This is fine if it's during declared "office hours"). If the call is from someone I know, then it's likely they could have also messaged me or emailed me.

But if the call is from someone I don't know, it's either a scam or they're trying to sell me something. Some situation where they are more prepared than I am. But even then, text can be unambiguous in detail where I might fail to hear something in the call. And with text, I can generally take my time to reply when I choose to, can take the time to consider what to reply, etc. For better or worse, text omits a lot of "body language" aspects too.