With the advent of cell phones and social media, the use of phones for actual calls rather than texts has decreased. While this might not be true for everyone with a cellphone, it has definitely definitely true for me, in fact any time I do get a phone call from someone that isn’t a family member, I usually let it go to voicemail. For the most part I reserve phone calls for family members without cellphones and for holidays and birthdays, which I believe warrant a phone call rather than a simple text because of the sentimentality that it holds. Any time I talk to my friends the conversation takes place via iMessage or on a social media platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. This simple fact has led me to call one of my friends for my analogue experience. For my phone call I decided to call one of my friends who lives in Virginia, and subsequently is one that I haven’t seen in a while due to the difference in our schedules which has led to most of our communication being in the form of texting via iMessage and Snapchat. 

Because phone calls require more attention, one of the first things that needed to be done was to actually schedule the call. This first step was proven to be a bit difficult. As previously mentioned one of the main reasons why my friend and I haven’t seen each other in a while has to do with the differences in our schedules, which is a difficulty that doesn’t necessarily need to be considered when texting, because texting is something that can be done at any time of the day. Texting can be considered much more convenient in this instance, because the message doesn’t expire and therefore can be responded to whenever the person receiving the message has the time to type a response. Phone calls don’t have this luxury and need to be planned at exactly the right moment so there aren’t any time restrictions and so both parties can give the phone call their full attention. This first and essentially only step was one that was proven very difficult. The first phone call that we scheduled was while I was driving home from school. I had wrongly assumed that I would be able to give the phone call my full attention and that my car’s Bluetooth system would allow for both of us to hear each other. This was not the case and the phone call was ended shortly once we both realized that we could not hear each other due to multiple reasons, including the road just being too loud which prevented both of us from hearing each other and the fact that my Bluetooth allowed me to hear my friend but wouldn’t let my friend hear me. In all honesty, planning the phone call while I was driving might not have been the smartest idea in the first place because of the attention that driving requires, the failure of this first phone call attempt was fully my fault. On this very short phone call that involved both of us unable to hear each other, we decided that we would call each other when I had gotten home. This plan was foiled by my friend being on another phone call that lasted too long preventing us from having the time to call. Over text, we decided that we would call sometime over the next few days because both of us were off from school due to our Thanksgiving breaks. When we were finally able to schedule a phone call it was later in afternoon the following day when both of us knew that there wouldn’t be any external factors that would prevent us from talking.

While on the phone call one of the main things I noticed is that there were many instances where I was unable to hear what he was saying and where he couldn’t hear what I was saying, leading to the next problem that occurred during phone calls that didn’t occur while texting: difficulties in hearing what the other person was saying. In these instances, we were left to saying, “What did you say?” and “I can’t hear you,”which are perfectly fine to say, but caused lags in the conversation that wouldn’t normally be there because texting avoids this issue completely. Despite this issue, the conversation still went on and lasted around 2 hours, which was an amount of time that both of us admitted as feeling much shorter than it actually was. I found that during these 2 hours we talked about many different things, similarly to when we text each other. The phone call didn’t create any actual limitations to what could be discussed, we talked many different things, including the movies that we had watched recently and our dream vacation locations. The only real limitation that the phone call had was that any little thing, like a movie title, that we talked about that could be easily forgotten, mostly due to my bad memory, wouldn’t be saved. However, this problem was easily addressed and anything that we needed to remember, like a TV show one of us had recommended to each other, was just sent as a text message so it couldn’t be forgotten.

Before this experiment, I assumed that there would be more than just one or two lags in conversation that would create awkwardness, but I was pleasantly surprised when this wasn’t the case. While there were instances of quiet, I found that these periods would be present in a normal face to face conversation and therefore were not an issue exclusive to phone calls themselves. I also came to realize that these periods were beneficial, since they had allowed both of us to think about what we would say next and had allowed us to formulate our thoughts. There can also be a comparison made between the silence during a phone call and an extended period of time without a text response, both allow the people having the conversation to think about what they are going to say next, however breaks of silence while texting have the ability to last longer periods of time, because there isn’t the feeling of there being a time limit. Lags in phone call conversations usually need to be resolved quickly or else the phone call ends, however breaks in texting still allow the conversation to pick up where it left off because both parties are able to look back and see what they were talking about. I also found that this made us talk about things that held more weight and value or the things that we would discuss in person. I have found that text conversations tend to be about things that don’t necessarily hold a lot of weight or personal value, but phone calls always seem to be more personal. I attribute this idea to the other idea that phone calls can act as a face-to-face conversation and almost replicate the closeness that occurs in those situations.

From this phone call “analogue” experience, I have come to the conclusion that while phone calls require more planning and more time, I may prefer them to texting. For me personally I have discovered that my best conversations occur when I talk to someone face to face, and while phone calls aren’t exactly face to face, they give off the illusion that the conversation is occurring this way. Before this analogue experiment, most, if not all, conversations with my friends had taken place via text message, phone calls were kept to parents and family members whenever there was a holiday or other special occasions. While I won’t make every conversation I have with friends occur via phone call because of the convenience and simplicity text messaging has, I will definite integrate them more into my day to day life because of the “closeness” and illusion of being a “face-to-face” conversation that they have.