We’re all dropping calls (and not because of our iPhone antennas)

I’m not referring to the annoyance of dropped connections (because of  Apple’s antenna woes or otherwise). I mean we’re embracing the convenience of dropping voice calls as the primary communication tool on our mobile phones. The number of voice calls the average mobile subscriber made peaked in 2007 and has declined each year since, and they’ve gotten shorter at the same time Clive Thompson explored this phenomenon yesterday in Wired:

We’re moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call. This shift is particularly stark among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all. I was recently hanging out with a twentysomething entrepreneur who fumbled around for 30 seconds trying to find the option that actually let him dial someone.

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

Check out the rest of the article. It brings up some interesting ideas about how the constant connectivity of  mobile devices, coupled with the light-touch communication style of social networks is changing how we communicate. As calls become more rare and messages become more constant, we may find that users are more open to communication, but at the same time more resistant to interruption.