Well, at least it’s not just me. I’ve been feeling a little hurt lately because my kids have been routinely ignoring my voice mails. Are they so busy, a voice in my head asks (a voice that sounds disturbingly like my father’s), that they can’t bother to respond to their dear old dad? But I shouldn’t take these snubs personally. A new telecom industry study found that more than 30 percent of voice messages languish unheard for at least three days, and that more than 20 percent of people with voice messages in their mailboxes rarely bother to check them at all. The anti–voice mail movement is strongest among the young—a reliable indication of voice mail’s coming demise. People under 30 are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text message than to a voice message. “Stop leaving me voice mails,” my son Max recently implored me. “If I see I missed your call, I’ll call you back. Deal?”
I made the deal. What choice did I have? I’m up against a force far more powerful than I: instant gratification. As The New York Times reported last week, thanks to text messaging, IMs, Twittering, and other forms of instantaneous communication, for a growing number of people the process of retrieving voice messages now feels painfully slow and cumbersome. In fact, Google and other companies are developing services that translate voice mails into texts and deliver them to e-mail boxes. So soon enough, we may never have to listen to those dreaded voice messages again. “Text is the future of voice mail,” technology trend tracker Piers Fawkes tells the Times. Who knows? Maybe someday, we won’t have to actually speak to each other either.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Kelly Cates to present Match of the DaySpeed Read Sky Sports presenter to take over from Gary Lineker at start of next season
-
Eclipses 'on demand' mark a new era in solar physicsUnder the radar The European Space Agency's Proba-3 mission gives scientists the ability to study one of the solar system's most compelling phenomena
-
Sudoku hard: December 16, 2024The Week's daily hard sudoku puzzle
-
Editor's letterfeature
-
Editor's letter: Are college athletes employees?
feature The National Labor Relations Board's decision deeming scholarship players “employees” of Northwestern University has many worrying that college sports itself will soon be history.
-
Editor's letter
feature
-
Editor's letter: When a bot takes your job
feature Now that computers can write news stories, drive cars, and play chess, we’re all in trouble.
-
Editor's letter: Electronic cocoons
feature Smartphones have their upside, but city streets are now full of people walking with their heads down.
-
Editor's letter: The real cause of income inequality
feature When management and stockholders pocket all the profits, the middle class falls further behind.
-
Editor's letter: The real reason you’re so forgetful
feature When you consider how much junk we’ve stored in our brains, it’s no surprise we can’t remember our PINs.
-
Editor's letter: Ostentatious politicians
feature The McDonnells’ indictment for corruption speaks volumes about the company elected officials now keep.