We’re moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call. This shift is particularly stark among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all. I was recently hanging out with a twentysomething entrepreneur who fumbled around for 30 seconds trying to find the option that actually let him dial someone.
This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.
Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)
The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another.
When I talk about 'glanceable' information, I'm referring to infusing potential information with an additional subtle layer of communication. Status that you can be ambiently aware of. The voice call as we know it allows for no such thing.
On some level, voice calls embedded with this kind of information might only have to look slightly different. Consider a phone that rings different tones depending on who's calling. That layer is easy enough to define (though annoying to arrange) and might be a first step.
Then imagine that as you called someone, you somehow indicated the nature of the request (not as easy to define), such that each call triggers a subtle change in that tone that could be recognized.
Anticipated length would be another important layer as well. I sometimes think that at some point URL shortening services are going to incorporate an additional digit that indicates how long the article you're about to click through to is. Once upon a time there was a URL shortening service (that I can't seem to find right away) that was intended for people in PR/marketing who tweeted occasionally about brands they worked for; the idea was that encoded into the URL was a number or two that corresponded to what kind of message it was. Something like "5" would mean it's a direct client, "4" would mean it's someone you used to work for, etc.
Obviously these are more-difficult-to-imagine layers, at least because it would require a mutual understanding of what this encoded information means.
The idea is that the communication methods we prefer have lots of subtle information already encoded into them. These layers may or may not communicate the same things as the phone scenario above, and actually this is why different people use the same communication channels in different ways (see this lovely illustration from Ji Lee). A simple example is that a channel like twitter encodes information into the number of followers/followed individuals have, information that gives you cues on how to communicate appropriately. Context is a layer; people often talk about "Facebook is for ___, Tumblr is for ____, Linkedin is for ____, Quora is for ____"; when you have a conversation in these contexts, the communication is implicitly shaped by it's surroundings.
The idea is that value can be condensed and intentionally infused into better (or just different?) communication methods.
