Are we losing the art of telephone conversation?

Statistics illustrating our addiction to our smartphones come out quite frequently and receive a lot of attention for information so unsurprising; it will come as no shock to anyone that the average Briton checks her phone every 12 minutes. Indeed, I’d like to pick a fight with the blandness of the questions asked in Ofcom’s latest telecommunications report. I wish they’d included: “Have you ever picked up your phone to Google where your phone is?” Or: “Have you ever smashed or otherwise been suddenly deprived of your phone, and wanted to stand in the street howling like a wolf?”

The report belongs in the news category “things we already knew, but are worried about, so will continue to pick at like a scab”. Yet there is one new element to our behaviour: we’ve stopped using telephones for talking to one another. The number of calls made dropped for the first time in 2017. It’s not a huge drop – 1.7% – and the figure may be misleading since calls made on WhatsApp and Facebook weren’t counted. Three-quarters of people still believe that voice calls are important. But that’s not as many – 92% – as the number who value their phones mainly for internet access.

Etiquette is underdeveloped in the world of the smartphone: there are people to whom sending six questions in six separate texts is itself rude and will call instead to solve the whole lot in a conversation; there are other people to whom this is horrible manners, since you should always stick to the medium via which you were contacted, unless explicitly invited to move to a different one. This tribalism has to be resolved, so we all know where we are. I once swapped media and personnel, replying to an email I had from one half of a couple with a phone call to the other. This was agreed to be the rudest thing that had ever happened.

It is commonly assumed that extroverts like phone calls and introverts like texting, but this isn’t necessarily the case: introverts tend to develop techniques for phone calls – a special voice, pacing about – which act like armour and allow all the communicative benefits of conversation without actually having to meet. Extroverts often prefer a face-to-face because they find it energising. There are people who genuinely love talking for hours over the phone – siblings, my plumber – but the true chat constituency was always adolescents, trying to escape their families by diving into the company of the intimates they’d chosen.

Digital natives probably wouldn’t understand a phone call of the olden days; meandering, one-on-one, hours long. The classic familial row of the 1980s – how much it had just cost for you to talk about nothing to a person you’d spent all day at school with – would be completely alien, with phone calls almost free and conversations seeming curiously thin unless there are six people in them. The slightly older native, say a millennial, seems a bit chary of the voice call: they text in advance to schedule them, or if they ring unannounced, start by apologising. The phonee in this scenario (as in, the person receiving the call; not the phoney) is the person whose liberty has been encroached upon.

Contrast that with the older phone user, the over-65, who will run to pick up a call regardless of what they’re doing, as if whatever random person who has got in touch them is automatically more important than whoever’s in front of them, by dint of … well, who knows what this dint is? Nobody understands it. Perhaps one of them would like to explain.

It is always easier to have a tricky conversation by text or email, or you think it is: what you’ve forgotten is how quickly, once discord has been established, it will escalate when using the written word. It is far more difficult to be a jerk in person, even from a distance, which is why phone calls can seem harder (often, all you want is to be a jerk) but are in fact easier (situations that are resolved in the moment without a trail of insult are gentler on the soul. Not always, just usually).

The other great disincentive is the voicemail: there’s nobody left on Earth who listens to them, but everyone has a recorded message insisting that they will. By the time you’ve called someone and found them unavailable, you’ve already invested all that finger energy so you’re damned if you’re going to revert to a text. This will ultimately be the end of the voice call, as we all confront that aching cacophony; millions of messages, floating in an unreal space, never to be heard, like some communicative dystopia dreamed up by Beckett (Samuel, not Margaret). If you’re a phone person, this is the end of your era. Make the most of it.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist