Being a Talker in a Digital Age

I’m a talker. I talk to everyone and always have. When I was a child and my mom took me to a restaurant, I’d stand on the seat, chatting up total strangers in the next booth. My mom thought I’d never finish that grilled cheese sandwich because I found the conversation with new acquaintances more delicious.

I admit I’m also one of those airplane passengers who strikes up conversations with willing seatmates. On one flight to Shanghai, I met a young post-doc from Stanford returning home to China to do research in her own lab. That midair conversation began a ten-year international friendship.

I even chose a career in PR — perfect for a confirmed talker. When I started in the field, it was called public relations, with an emphasis on the relationships. The better you knew people, the more valuable you were in the field. I built decades-long relationships on the phone.

Remember the phone? It was the tool that served the sole purpose of sharing human voices — hearing tone, inflection and nuance. You knew if the person on the other line was having a good day or a bad day. You built trust because you felt like you knew someone.

Remember the phone? It was the tool that served the sole purpose of sharing human voices.

Now, our phones are just small computers that we’d rather use to text or send a Whatsapp than actually speaking. Emails and texts lack the nuance in tone of phone calls. And sometimes, a brief, quick response can even feel confrontational.

When public relations began to turn into marketing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I realized that relationships and communications were prized mostly for their value in making the sale. Gone were the days of phone calls and friendships. I wasn’t willing to forego that satisfying human contact and trade it in for short texts and emails.

So, I left the field and became a school counselor in 2011. I loved that job because, guess what? I could talk to people, teens mostly, who had a lot to say. On the cusp of adulthood, they had important questions about navigating their journeys.

But today, most of my students just want to Whatsapp their questions in as few words as possible — even questions about major life decisions. They have grown up in an era where people have forgotten the pleasures and the art of conversation.

It isn’t just kids. I had two school administrators tell me they didn’t have “bandwidth” to speak on the phone (but they did have the bandwidth to send me five emails on something that could have been addressed in one short conversation). A reporter requested an interview with one of my students and offered four different ways to contact her — not one was a phone number. I wondered how she planned to conduct the interview, and without hearing her tone of voice, I could not assess her attitude; a phone call could have avoided the mystery about her intentions.

I do like Zoom and FaceTime, which are better than emails or texts, but they require some orchestration, and intimacy is difficult in a group Zoom gathering. The pandemic has only accelerated our reliance on these platforms.

I miss the spontaneity and intimacy that comes with a phone call. The further we go down the rabbit hole of digital speak, the more detached we will become from one another, and the less we will yearn to reach out. Our time and our hearts, freely given, are our most precious gifts. Next to letter writing, a personal phone conversation is one of the best ways to give them.

While we remain mostly home-based, it’s a great time to “reach out and touch someone,” as one of the old telephone companies used to advertise. You can bring joy to a person living alone. You can surprise a friend by calling to say, “I just wanted to hear your voice and hear how you are.” Rather than reminisce about childhood connections made in restaurants and memorable airplane conversations, I’m ready to make new memories right here, right now, through meaningful conversations. How about you?

Phyllis Folb is the Founder/Executive Director of the American Israel Gap Year Association (AIGYA). Her book, “Find Your Right Direction: The Israel Gap Year Guide,” is available on Amazon. To contact: info@aigya.org or to learn more visit www.aigya.org.