Talking With Our Mouths

In the spirit of this newsletter, I narrated an audio version, so you can listen to it if you prefer. Maybe I’ll do this more in the future… or maybe I won’t.

I recently spoke with Carly Stern of Nieman Storyboard for her series on effective editing, and the Q&A came out last week. We had a great conversation about my transition from editor to writer, and some of my theories about editing. It was a nice moment of closure for me; it felt like tying a ribbon on my Editing Era, which was, after all, 12 years of my life.

The headline they went with made me laugh a little.

But maybe it is counterintuitive wisdom at this point. The phone, the not-smart part of it, the part where you dial and make calls, Alexander-Graham-Bell style, is fraught for people my age and younger. You may have heard—many, many articles have been written to inform you—that phone calls give us anxiety. We fear them, we avoid them. We prefer to text.

When I was a kid, I definitely was petrified of talking on the phone. My mom was always trying to desensitize me to it. If I wanted to go to the library or the toy store, she would make me call them first, to see if they were open. It only occurred to me years later that of course she knew they were open, she just wanted to force me to use the phone.

Cut to a couple decades later when talking on the phone is my job. So I guess it worked?

Interviews and reporting are part of it. But toward the end of my Editing Era, when I was also doing a lot of managing, I used to say, only slightly jokingly, that my job was basically just talking. Talking to writers, direct reports, my boss, relaying information up and down the chain, going to meetings. Sometimes I would end the day hoarse after hours of talking. (Not even counting that time I hosted a podcast.)

A lot of this was my own doing. Many, many times, I received a thoughtful, elegantly worded multi-paragraph email or Slack message replete with bullet points and hyperlinks, and sent a one-line reply asking if we could just hop on a call. In this day and age, that can be quite a jump scare, I know, and I thank my colleagues for putting up with me. But I didn’t always feel that way, as I mentioned in the Nieman interview:

“Can we just talk with our mouths?” is also, regrettably, something I say to people sometimes.

Anyway, I kept work communications to email as much as possible when I was younger partly because, as I mentioned, I thought it was more efficient. But I also think it had to do with wanting to maintain control over what I said. When I was less confident in my abilities, it felt more important to take the time to carefully craft what I wanted to say. If I had to respond live, in the moment, I might say the wrong thing. I might seem, even, like someone who doesn’t have all the answers.

The same desire for control applies to the preference for texting over calling in our social lives. You can think about what you want to say, edit it as much as you like, and respond whenever is convenient for you.

Several years ago I wrote an article about how it had become totally normal to ignore texts and emails, and the issue of control came up in an interview I did with Sherry Turkle for that piece:

With the decline of the phone call, we lose tone of voice, the subtle nonverbal cues of spoken communication, the immediacy and aliveness of real-time conversation. Not to mention that, for me anyway, verbally processing with another person leads to insight more often than sitting there alone until I come up with the perfect email or text response. But to get there, you have to sacrifice control and accept uncertainty. I think my comfort with phone calls has risen in tandem with my comfort saying “I don’t know.”

The primacy of written communication is so ingrained now that it’s become a matter of etiquette. Phone calls are sometimes perceived as rude, intrusive, or alarming. Even the calls I do have with friends tend to be scheduled over text first. An unexpected phone call implies emergency—there have been times when a friend or family member called me just to chat, and I answered with “Is everything okay?” And if your boss calls you unexpectedly? Panic.

Texting or emailing is seen as more polite because we’re offering other people the same control we want for ourselves, and minimizing the obligation put on them by only asking for a fraction of their time and attention whenever they can get around to it, rather than asking for their full attention right now. But baked into that is an assumption that interaction is always an imposition.

In our personal lives, all this texting and emailing can make our relationships feel more like work. People feel overwhelmed by the pile-up of notifications in their group chats. Every text is like a tiny addition to your mental to-do list—if you don’t respond to it now, you have to remember to respond to it later. (This is the part I am bad at; I either respond to texts in 30 seconds or three days.) In reporting my book, people have told me how big a barrier to friendship the work of scheduling time to hang out is. There are a lot of reasons for that, but an aversion to phone calls doesn’t help. Scheduling a happy hour with a friend could take several texts, spaced hours or even days apart, as you negotiate your availability, the venue, the time. Or you could figure it out in two minutes on the phone.

When I started doing more phone calls with writers, and my colleagues, that was still literally work, yes. But it felt more like a working relationship than responding to an interminable email thread, which is more of a task that we take turns doing alone.

Anyway. I still text, I still email. Obviously. And I enjoy it, more often than I don’t. Conversely, talking with our mouths is not always easy—there is misunderstanding, fumbling, and difficulty. And even after a decade in journalism, I still regularly get sweaty during interviews. But sometimes, the feeling of stepping away from the keyboard and just hopping on a call is not fear, but relief.