Derek Neighbors works around young techies every day. As the co-founder of Gangplank, a collaborative workspace in Chandler and incubator for several small software startups, Neighbors is used to looking out over a sea of software engineers, mobile developers and a whole lot of geeky laptop stickers.
But sometimes even Neighbors gets schooled in the latest tech practices by his teenage daughter.
“My 16-year-old daughter texted me the other evening,” says the 39-year-old married father of three, whose field unavoidably entails a certain amount of late code-monkey hours.
“She told me the Internet was not working at home, and she wanted to finish her movie.”
First World problems, to be sure. But watching the rest of the flick on her cellphone using her 4G connection was simply out of the question.
“She didn’t want to use her data minutes on her mobile device. I told her that the router probably needed to be reset.”
Despite being surrounded by young techies every day, Derek Neig hbors is still shown up by his 16-year-old “digital native” daughter. Photo by Tim Sealy
At times like these, when a single picture of the inputs on a Wi-Fi box can be more helpful than a thousand instructional words, Neighbors usually prefers texting to talking on the phone. “It’s great when I need to send rich media, like a picture.”
But Neighbors was surprised when, before he could even image-search a diagram of the router on his iPhone, an incoming call from his daughter lit up the screen. Alas, it turned out to be an invitation to a FaceTime chat, Apple’s version of the video calling technology also popularized by services like Skype.
“She was standing in the room and asked me to walk her through it,” says Neighbors, who admits his daughter has an advantage over him by being a “digital native” who’s never known life before personal computers.
“In about two minutes we had things up and running again. What would have taken a 20-minute phone call to accomplish was done with a two-minute FaceTime. All I could think was how dumb I was for not thinking of that!”
The exchange between Neighbors and his daughter provides a perfect example of the ways modern families communicate with each other today: through a dizzying combination of texting, tweeting, Facebook posts and FaceTime chats—but almost never through old-fashioned phone calls.
“I think it is difficult when conversations only exist in a single mode,” offers the consummate techie, who’s clearly doing a better job than most parents in making sense of the new communication tools.
“Relationships and conversations should be augmented nicely by multiple modes of communication.”
Neighbors admits there are certain times when he’ll use his smartphone to make an actual phone call, usually to his wife—“if I’m standing in the store and I don’t know what brand of something to buy, and my text is going unanswered.” But he rejects the idea that the voice call provides the best emotional connection.
“Nowadays when I want emotional—say, talking to my married daughter in Tennessee or my parents in Payson—I prefer video chat,” he says. “It is so much more rich than just voice alone.”
No Talking
Among young people, calling on the phone has become even more passé. According to a study of 7,000 class of 2014 high school graduates conducted by Niche, a research arm of Carnegie Mellon University, 87 percent of today’s high school grads admit they text several times a day, compared to less than a third of them placing a phone call.
Texting has become the preferred channel of communication between younger kids, too. Two-thirds of the 12 -to-17-year olds surveyed in the latest data from the Pew Research Center said they’re more likely to use their cellphones to text their friends than talk to them. In fact, fully half of the teens studied reported sending 50 or more text messages per day, with one in three sending more than 100 per day. By comparison, most teens reported receiving less than five phone calls per day—typically from their less tech-savvy parents.
“Carrying on two-way conversations is difficult, as they are a constant stream of action-reaction and can get messy,” says Kristy Roschke, a PhD student teacher at ASU.
“Texting is just easier because it is always on the message sender’s terms,” says Kristy Roschke, a PhD student teacher specializing in digital media at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. “Carrying on two-way conversations is difficult, as they are a constant stream of action-reaction and can get messy.”
As a busy mother of a 15-month-old toddler, Roschke, 39, gets the appeal of texting. “Texting has saved my life,” she jokes, “because I never would communicate with the outside world if I had to get wrapped up in a lot of phone calls, especially when he’s up and around. I don’t have time to call my husband and ask him to pick up milk; I’d rather just shoot him a text.”
But she does worry that a generation is growing up with a marked avoidance of verbal communication.
“Texting means you don’t have to deal with hearing the person’s reaction,” Roschke says, which she feels is part of the reason millennials prefer it. “It sort of excuses you from some of the fallout of your words.”
Before ASU, Roschke taught high school journalism for nine years, and says she occasionally had to mediate fights between students who had never actually spoken to each other face-to-face.
“I saw this happen many times when I was teaching high school,” she says. “Students were emboldened by their ability to speak their minds via text and not have to worry about the other person’s immediate reaction. Of course, reactions inevitably came, but they were almost always also via text. A whole ‘fight’ could transpire and be resolved by text before the students had even seen or talked to each other. And when I did suggest—or in some cases insist—that students work things out face-to-face, they seemed terrified by the idea. They absolutely have lost the ability to look someone in the eye and tell them how they feel.”
Roschke worries that millennials’ aversion to talking with one another may create a generation ill-equipped to function in real-life work environments, “where you have to sit with people in the same room.” She’s seen courses offered at ASU designed to prepare students for interacting in a social environment—something the college experience itself used to provide.
“I think we are losing our ability to be spontaneous communicators, and I think this will have big implications in the future as people have trouble in relationships, working in groups, even conducting interviews,” she warns.
“There is opportunity for more precision in written correspondence, but there can also be a certain falseness to it, given the amount of prep work that may have gone into a response. What this means for younger and future generations is staggering.”
Performance Prose
If the quotes in this article read a little polished and perhaps just a bit academic, there’s a reason: most of the interviews for this piece were conducted by text.
Roschke opts to switch to a phone interview halfway through. “When you’re texting, you have more time to construct responses, you can verify information before you send it,” she says over the phone. “But you’re not learning how to read people, you’re not getting those follow-up questions and learning how to read a conversation. You’re giving the best possible version of the answer you’re inclined to give. But it all just feels a little false to me.”
I think often we get a more true view of a person’s self when they have the mask of the machine to stand behind,” says Derek Neighbors, with his daughter, Ashley. Photo by Tim Sealy
Neighbors, however, sticks to texting the whole way through. “I think we get the persona of who someone wants to be, instead of how we may see them,” he says—or rather, writes. But he counters that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“Allowing yourself to think about responses and removing yourself by making the machine your interface—text versus voice—allows a more true you to surface. It drops a lot of fear.”
In her 2011 book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,” MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle describes texting as a “deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.”
And indeed, many of the young people Turkle interviewed said they prefer texting because they can appear smarter, wittier and better-read in carefully composed texts than in off-the-cuff spoken conversation. Texting also allows the sender to keep the verbal ticks that pop up in phone conversations—pauses and inflections that may signify nervousness, drunkenness or even lying—hidden. One 16-year-old Turkle talks to professes to avoiding the phone because “on the telephone, too much might show.”
Neighbors challenges that view.
“I think often we get a more true view of a person’s self when they have the mask of the machine to stand behind,” he says. “I do think we lose a lot in terms of tone and inflection. I think this is why emojis have become so popular. They are filling the gap by putting emotion on top of sterile words.”
Mastering use of the smiley faces, abbreviations, Internet memes and animated GIFs we substitute for spoken responses, however, can be like learning a second language. Even punctuation can serve to express emotion—and OMG if you get it wrong.
“I had that happen to me in a text,” says Marcy Luganob, assignment manager at KTAZ, the Telemundo affiliate in Phoenix. Luganob’s job requires her to dispatch quick and clear instructions to remote reporters and photographers, which she’s found work better by text. But sometimes a misplaced exclamation mark or capitalized word can send the wrong message, and put a damper on the day.
“I was sending off a note and I capitalized ‘DO NOT,’ for emphasis,” she says. “And the woman I sent it to took that as I was yelling at her! Sometimes things can be taken in a way that you don’t mean.”
Even a delayed text reply can send an unintended message. “One time I was texting with my sister,” says Luganob, who was born in the Philippines, raised in Guam and later Tucson and keeps in touch with family members around the globe. “And we were arguing about whether our mom needed to go into assisted living. Suddenly she stopped responding to my texts.
“That’s when I called her,” Luganob says with a laugh. “Sometimes when people don’t respond to a text, you end up calling them because you assume they’re upset. And you just need to hear their voice to make sure they’re OK.”
Don’t Hang Up
Judy Ortiz has a vintage pay phone installed on the wall of her Tucson home that her granddaughter has no idea how to use.
“When she was smaller, she came over and looked at it and didn’t even know what it was,” she says. “She had never dialed a phone before. Which seems so strange to me!”
Ortiz is a former telephone company employee who, for 42 years, worked for Arizona’s main telecommunications supplier, first known as Mountain Bell, then US West, then Qwest and finally CenturyLink. Today Ortiz is Arizona chapter president of the CenturyLink Pioneers network, a 50,000-member group of current and retired phone company employees who provide volunteer community services for things like the Talking Books program for the blind and strive to preserve the history of the American telephone through operations such as the Pioneer Telephone Museum in central Phoenix.
“She had never dialed a phone before. Which seems so strange to me!” says Judy Ortiz of her young granddaughter who didn’t know how to use the vintage pay phone she has in her house.
She remembers fondly the days when the telephone on the kitchen wall was the communications hub for every family; when teenage girls would stretch the extension cord into the next room for private calls and a personal Princess phone in the bedroom was the ultimate status symbol.
“Oh yeah,” she says with a laugh. “And I remember calling my friends and getting the busy signal and trying to call them back all night. Boy, that was annoying!”
Ortiz has gotten into texting a little, solely to keep in touch with her two granddaughters. But she clearly misses the days of the long telephone chat.
“I think kids lose a lot of personal touches by texting instead of calling,” she says. “It’s much more personal to be on the phone. If you have a good friend or relative, you can get on the phone and you might talk for an hour about all kinds of things. But if it’s a text, you just ask what you want, get a reply and you’re done.”
Ortiz says one of her granddaughters calls her (“because she knows talking on the phone is what I like to do”), but the other will only text.
“I tell her, the phone is for talking. That’s what it was invented for,” she says. “Why in the world would I want to type when I can talk?”