Miss call me when you’re home

That was the thing friends or parents would say after a night out and it shows use for the telephone without actually placing a call. This was just one of the thoughts I had after reading Clive Thompson’s “Death of the telephone call” in Wired (August 2010, US edition). There’s much more too, and I could certainly empathize with many of the reasons Thompson used to cite the death of the telephone call. I definitely use SMS, instant message or email much more than picking up a phone, but although I can see my own person use of the phone declining in-line with the data Thompson quotes, I don’t think it means the death of voice communication.

As a team member on GrapevineTalk.com, I’ve certainly been in conversations where we generally talk not about the death of voice as a communication medium, but a change in the ways we use voice to interact with others. Although I have a vested interest in discussing and promoting Grapevine as a tool, I want to put forward some ideas we’ve had and hopefully use that as a means to continue the discussion on what is a very interesting and changing area.

It would be understandable to make a connection between voice and the telephone call but we believe voice has a bigger role to play. To consider one of the points Thompson brings up, let’s look at presence information.

Thompson says that when placing a call, there’s no way of know if the other person is able to take a call, or even wants to take a call from you. There’s also no context, or agenda, beforehand to give the receiver information to help them make the decision if they should accept the call or not. However, with applications like Skype, or Google Talk, presence information is built in. I can see if someone is available, signed out or marked as busy. This still leaves the issue of subject context and willingness. With communication tools like Instant Messaging or email, the sender can type and send a message and the receiver doesn’t have to be paying attention to the message until they are ready to read and respond. With voice based applications, there’s no way, apart from voicemail, to “fire and forget” as a sender, and “read and respond” as a receiver. However, as Thompson points out, the general consensus is people don’t like voicemail.

One of the points that Thompson makes is that being interrupted by a phone call can be emotionally draining. However, an interesting side affect of this is that you have received an emotional response in the first place. I have often been a victim of a misunderstanding that occurs by text only based communication. There’s that often quoted research from Albert Mehrabian about percentages of communication (7% words, 38% tone of voice, 55% body language), and it’s that tone of voice and emotional response that we gain through voice based communications. If we can’t meet face-to-face because of distributed working, distance learning or for one of many other reasons, how can increase understanding and take advantage of tone of voice and emotion as part of the communication whilst not being interrupted?

At Grapevine, one of the ways we’ve attempted to deal with this is for the sender of a message being able to leave a message without requiring presence information, much like how you would send an email. As a recipient, you can control the information the Grapevine client gives you, choosing that messages are played in real-time, or that a notification of a new message has arrived, or just visual indication in the application so the user can check messages in their own time and respond when ready. Here we believe emotion and tone of voice is preserved, whilst not interrupting the user while they are involved elsewhere.

One of the reasons I tend to use email over a phone call is that I can take time to craft a response to a question. It still comes with Meharian’s communication issue of words only being 7% of the communication, but I tend to feel that I can explain and elaborate where appropriate. In a conversation over the phone, or in person, silences are not golden, but awkward. This leaves us to um and ah, or blabber on without us taking time for a considered response. One of the use cases we’ve always had from the start with Grapevine is a message can be received while the receiver is away from the computer, making coffee perhaps. They listen to the message when ready and respond after they’ve thought through a reply.

Although this interchange which may take seconds over the phone, can take minutes or even hours through a voice application like Grapevine. These messages can then be replayed so the conversation flows naturally to others who are catching up with the conversation.

What this all comes down to is that the telephone isn’t fit for purpose anymore. Thompson predicts that the phone call will become useful for longer, deeper discussions, while becoming less and less used for general communication. More conference calls then? It may not be just conference calls, but anyone who has worked in a distributed team will know the pain of trying to organise people across different offices, or even different timezones to get onto a conference call. With Grapevine, group communication is at the heart of the platform, and with the ability to catch up with messages in your own time, there’s no need to schedule a time to all be online using the application at the same time.

I still don’t believe that this means there’s no other place for voice. If you could use voice to gain the emotional context, without the need to be interrupted and throw in a sprinkle of presence and subject information, you can get the best out of voice communications. One final thought is where Thompson mentions that people have been known to use applications like Skype to have a persistent telepresence communication channel open all day. Using Grapevine, you an have all of the above advantages whilst also keeping a channel open all day, and this time a silent channel is not an awkward channel, where that may be the case with an open phonecall.