Does Anyone Answer Their Phone Anymore?

Welcome to 2018, where communication has been reduced to acronyms and Emojis. The joke that we are going to be communicating in hieroglyphics again is slowly becoming our reality. As someone who used to study hieroglyphics in my spare time, I welcome this new form of communication. However, those hieroglyphics are replaced by Emojis. I'd rather the hieroglyphics.

We have made serious downgrades in our communication system. Thoughtful hand written letter with full sentences and punctuation have been replaced by "K." Our use of language is bland and blunt. Our words are short, limited to the least amount of syllables we can get away with. The thesaurus has become obsolete. However with all of that said, the most glaring change in our communication is the simple fact that we don't answer the phone anymore.

Many households no longer have a house phone. Long gone are the days when you were tethered down to a corded phone. Long gone are the days when you had to wait for someone to get off of the phone. Long gone are the days when you couldn't be on the internet and the phone at the same time. We rely on our cell phones and have discarded the family phone.

We have a house phone in my home, however the majority of the calls are telemarketers. Very rarely do we use the phone. We spend the day checking the caller ID, seeing it's a spam call, and answering it just to hang up moments later to stop the ringing. Our answering machine (or voicemail) is full to capacity because we check it infrequently.

The phone aspect of cell phone has slowly become obsolete. We use our phones for social media, games, and GPS. We text, we do not call. We let calls go to voicemail and then respond to the caller with a text message.

If communication continues with this pattern, where will we be in 5 years? How much will our communication deteriorate if we continue to lower ourselves to symbols and acronyms?

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