Thanks, Jennifer for writing this. It helps me understand why you communicate the way you do and enables me to communicate with you even better.

I will agree with you that sometimes it is really hard to understand what someone says on the phone. I have to ask people to repeat things all the time. Sometimes the telephone is also an interruption if I am in the middle of trying to think something through and it messes with my train of thought.

However, it is also the best way to get a hold of a lot of people. You can also be a little more persistent if you are on the phone. Emails can be ignored or not dealt with immediately. But if it is something urgent and you need answers now or need someone to do something the telephone is useful.

It is also very nice if you are really missing someone and just need to hear their voice and actually talk rather than email/letter.

Okay, now that I've rambled on for a little bit. I really enjoyed reading your post. It wasn't controversial in the least. But that's coming from someone who is specializing in nonverbal communication.

Bethany, are you sure I'm not a "bad person" for disliking talking on the phone?

You said, "It helps me understand why you communicate the way you do and enables me to communicate with you even better." How do you envision this changing how we communicate?

I do agree that sometimes it is nice to hear someone's voice.

Thanks for commenting.

Yes, you really are a bad person for not wanting to talk on the phone. To demonstrate this, I have provided six Reasons I would rather talk on the phone than via E-Mail or IM:

I listen better than I read: My mother found this out a long time ago, and that's why I've listened to so many books on tape. For you, reading is fun as is evidenced by the quantity of books that you can go through in a year. For me, on the other hand, it is usually frustrating. I have trouble getting the words off the page and into my brain and frequently miss things; verbal communication is much less prone to such slips.

I can hear verbal cues: Much as you like the non-verbal cues, I like the verbal ones. I have difficulty sometimes picking up humor or other subtleties of what is being said without any sort of a cue that it's coming. While I would agree that talking to the person face-to-face is superior, the phone is a nice second best.

It's usually faster and more efficient: While e-mail is asynchronous and "at your convenience," most things require a fair amount of back-and-forth before they become completely clear to the two parties. On E-Mail, this requires several back-and-forth E-Mails, and as most people do not check their E-Mail any more frequently than every couple of hours (if that,) this takes a long time. It also frequently takes longer write something out and to read it than to simply say and hear it over the telephone; there are very few native English speakers (I recognize that this is not always true for those who are working in a non-native language) who honestly have as rapid a command of written as spoken English.

Spelling and Grammar are a non-issue: First off, it should be noted that I hate most IM/text abbreviations. I can handle the occasional "LOL" or "BRB," but there are so many of those little abbreviations that one cannot keep track of them all. With that being said, many people (including myself) don't always have a ready knowledge of how to spell a lot of words, and so ambiguity can be introduced that would be nonexistent over the phone. It gets worse when you throw in those people who don't have a good handle of written grammar; then you may have to ask for clarification multiple times before you actually figure out what they are saying. (As a side-note, I had to go back and change at least a half-dozen words in this one paragraph due to spelling issues.)

It's far more relaxing: When talking on the phone, you can be much more yourself because you don't have the added layer of translation of letters and punctuation marks. You aren't constantly correcting yourself and trying to make it perfect, and you are free to simply talk to the other person. You can also hear the other person's voice instead of the monotone of the keyboard. While it's fun to see "I <3 You!" from my fiancée in the IM window, an "I Love You!" over the phone is much better.

Phone calls are an interruption: By picking up the phone and talking to a person you are taking a break from whatever you are doing and giving your attention to that person. While it can be frustrating when someone takes a call when they are in the middle of a conversation with you, I would much rather they take a call than sit there and text, IM, or answer E-Mails while I'm trying to talk to them. The very act of picking up the phone and switching your attention to that object means that you're not half-talking to me or to the other person, you're giving both of us your full attention for shorter periods.

So yes, you are "a bad person" for not wanting to talk on the phone.

(For those of you on the Internet who don't know, I love my sister-in-law dearly, and don't really think she's a bad person simply because she hates phones.)

Jason,

I decided not to post "Six Reasons I Don't Use a Popular Social Network" today so you don't feel like I'm picking on your communication too much.

I also acknowledge that there are going to be differences. I am particularly visually-oriented, and I know audio works better for you.

I have some disagreements with the points you make. I don't think you give enough allowance for differences in the way others think. Visual learners make up the majority of the population. (http://vudat.msu.edu/learning_styles/)

I think we also have some disagreement about how language works.

Even though we disagree, thanks for responding to the post.

Well, I knew that you much preferred IM or email to talking on the phone and now I know why.

On the interrupting part---my goodness, you KNOW I have a much better grasp of that angle of phone calls than anyone else in the family (can we say 6+ phone calls in an hour? That is the current norm for my calls for Arkansas. Once I reach the six I start screening calls for a few hours.)

However, yesterday morning, I picked up the phone and my best friend from Missouri called. Now that was a wonderful interruption.

One reason I generally prefer the phone is that when I am talking on the phone I am not tethered to the computer. I can dust the dining room table (I have one now!), put dishes in the dishwasher, or whatever. Or, I can just curl up in my chair an enjoy a good chat.

In Jason's response, he should have noted in paragraph #2 that it was his ANGEL mother who figured out that he is much more audio than visual in his learning. Maybe I should call him on the phone and tell him?

However, while I often prefer phone conversations, it doesn't particularly bother me to use IM or email. I type fairly fast, and written communication doesn't bother me. I have a specific friend who speaks so rapidly that I usually prefer IM for communications with that individual.

So all this is to say......different strokes for different folks. I'll call Jason and IM you. :) And no, you are not a bad person for not enjoying phone calls.

Now I'm off to write my own list of "Six Reasons Why I Love my Daughter-in-Law." :)

After talking (via IM) with you for a while, I will admit that our brains interpret language differently, and I never expected that a brain could work quite like yours. In that case, I will grant to you that some people do simply handle written communication more naturally than verbal communication.

On the other hand, I looked at the link you posted about learning styles, and I don't really fit cleanly into any of them except perhaps "intuitive" and "reflective," neither of which fall on the audio/visual scale. My problem with written communication is that I find it cumbersome and it doesn't translate easily. If trying to understand something, I like a picture as much as the next person, I simply don't internalize text as easily as some.

BTW: Sorry if my first post sounded a little flamy.

Deb,

Perhaps I'll have to post a list of "Six Reasons I Love my Mother-in-Law" later this week :-)

Jason,

It was the second chart on that link that I was pointing to.

Your first post didn't sound flamy. In fact, I laughed a lot when I read it.

I'd be interested in seeing the post regarding the social-network-that-must-not-be-named. (You know, posting lists within comment threads of other lists doesn't count against your total goal, so that might be a way to fit in more lists...) One reason for this is that I have observed some difficulty on my part in simply accepting the preferences of others. I don't have the time right now to go into detail and formulate an eloquent description of what amounts to a number of abstract concepts floating around in a somewhat disorganized fashion. But it has something to do with feeling like preferences are at some level prescriptive: "If I feel this way about something, so should everyone else. If they don't, it's for a reason, so one of us is right and the other is wrong, and either they need to change, or I do." So when someone chooses to refrain from something like a social network but I do not, simply knowing that they've chosen differently makes me uneasy somehow, regardless of why. Same thing with dialects, since you're on the language topic; I don't like them.

Wow! I should have posted my second response earlier so I wouldn't need to respond to all that!

Tom, I completely understand where you are coming from. I have those same feelings myself quite often.

Jennifer, I meant what I said about it helping me to communicate better with you. Since I know you prefer IM, I will try to communicate with you that way more often, since face-to-face is often impractical (however if you and Michael have sudden desires to come visit, please do so!) It also gives me more understanding if you are not fast to respond, I will understand that you are probably just thinking. In fact, you're blog on communication inspires me to IM with you more often.

Jason, how am I supposed to respond to that? I will agree that communicating via email with people who have forgotten that punctuation exists is very frustrating.

I personally communicate many different ways with different people. With some people, I communicate in multiple ways; while others, I prefer to communicate in one way verses another. Am I making any sense? In other words, you're both right!

Ok, I finally have time to respond to the comments.

I think some preferences are not at all prescriptive, but others do have a certain level. To take Jason's preference for the telephone for example.

I think it is perfectly acceptable for Jason to prefer the telephone to e-mail. I have no issue with his claims like "Much as you like the non-verbal cues, I like the verbal ones."

I take a small level of issue with his statement "It's far more relaxing" because he isn't expressing this opinion in relation to himself. To the extent that he is saying he finds it more relaxing, he can hold that opinion, but if he is saying that it is objectively more relaxing, I have to disagree.

At other points in his argument, I think he fails to take into consideration some parts of an issue (for example I think discussion of "efficiency" needs to include whether we are optimizing for total time spent or lowest latency -- telephone calls certainly have lower latency than e-mail, but that doesn't necessarily make them most efficient).

I also think he is wrong on a few of his objective claims, but I'm not particularly keen on making this post too argumentative.

I think there are objective truths (or untruths) behind many preferences, and persuading someone of truth or untruth of a reason may change their opinion. However there are also going to be cases where different opinions are formed because of differences in the people rather than differences in the available information (for example personality type or learning style), and I don't think that different opinions rising from such intrinsic differences require one opinion to be better than the other.

For why I don't like a certain social network... this list won't have six items because I have misplaced my original list, and I think grouping some ideas into broader general concepts will be fine.

First, last time I checked, I objected to the terms of service. I don't recall the reason, but given that I don't accept the terms of service, I am disqualified from using it. (Yes, I generally read terms of service before using a service, and this isn't the only service I've declined using because of disagreement).

Next, the social network is a closed system. Open and closed aren't binary, but rather a scale. I don't mind using Twitter (even though it doesn't use an open protocol) because other people don't have to use Twitter to see my tweets. For particularly closed systems, being closed makes it inconvenient to those people who aren't already in the system.

I think those in charge of the unnamed social network have also done things which were unethical (whether it was deliberate or negligent). Recently, they failed to attribute open source software they used, violating the license. http://developers.enormego.com/view/what-happened-common-courtesy-facebook They may have fixed the problem, but they were still negligent. There have been many prior incidents in which they violated public trust by changing terms of service or privacy policy without sufficient prior notice. They marketed a feature with bad privacy implications as being beneficial for privacy (if you authorize your "friends" to see certain information, third parties can have access to that information through this feature).

I also dislike the mindsets the network tries to encourage. In real life, I don't consider most people I know to be my "friends," not that my relationships aren't mostly positive, but I reserve the "friendship" for a certain depth of relationship. Digitally, it aggravates me that it would so casually apply the label of "friend" to people I would only consider acquaintances or people I've never met. While I grant that others may have a lower bar for friendship or a higher tolerance for using the term in other contexts, I think that the use of the term encourages a distorted perception of relationship. I think that it is possible to have authentic friendship for people who have only connected virtually, but I think that digital interaction frequently gives a false sense of intimacy that cheapens the genuine thing.

I also dislike the mindsets encouraged in terms of safety and privacy. I think the network being discussed encourages people to share a lot of information without thinking about the implications of sharing. While I don't think all online sharing is unwise (I do have a blog after all), I think it is unfortunate that people assume that the level of sharing is a good thing. I think that a certain social network constantly pushes the bounds of what they try to make people assume is good to share. Occasionally they cross a line and have to step back, but they constantly seem to be testing the fence of how much they can get people to share before people respond. It also seems like they are trying to make it seem like their network is somehow safer than the rest of the Internet, which strikes me as utterly absurd.

With a network, being part of the network encourages others to use it. Even if I didn't add more than the minimal information, being on the network would tell people that it is an acceptable way to give information to me. I have felt excluded at times for not being on it. I would hate for my presence on it to lead to either the acceptance of the network by some or the exclusion of those who don't accept the network.

Bethany,

Thanks. I wasn't trying to communicate that I doubted your statement. I was just curious what that looks like (after all, we didn't talk on the phone all that much before this post).

Thank you, Jennifer for the blog post and thank you to all who posted comments. This thread has been very useful in writing a paper on IM communication. Thanks a lot!

Jennifer, I didn't mean that you doubted it. Sorry it came out that way.