The End of Civilization Starts With a Phone Call

Among my daily readings online, I include The American Spectator, the Washington Post, and the Washington Times. I recently came across an interesting piece in the Post regarding the new phone etiquette. I was fascinated to find that merely picking up the phone and calling someone is no longer considered to be socially acceptable. You must text the person first and warn him or her that you will be interrupting their sacred cyberspace with an actual phone call. I also learned that leaving a voicemail is now considered to be gauche. Human voice contact is something to be avoided these days. This was also much a revelation to me. Since I don’t text, I am in the dark about these new rules or what kind of perverse individuals would make them up.

I do not consider myself to be a total luddite. When I was on active duty in the military in the 1990s, I directed experimentation with then-cutting-edge technologies, such as robotics, small drones, and non-lethal weapons. I use my laptop to write articles such as these and find it much easier for my arthritic fingers to manipulate the keys than I do texting, as I never got much beyond hunt and peck on a typewriter. Spell-check and backspace are really neat for editing. That said, I think the smartphone and texting are the Devil’s work, and quite possibly the end of civilization as we have known it since the Renaissance.

The art of letter writing went the way of the Dodo when the information age dawned. Phone calls and eventually emails were much faster and more efficient than snail mail. I liked the fact that I could send complicated communications with friends and family and get a near-immediate response, and I still do. However, I am appalled to go to a restaurant and see two people sitting at the same table and not talking, just texting. I am never sure if they are texting each other or some people not in the same room. Conversation is rapidly becoming a lost art, and the emoji is replacing literature as a form of expressing feelings. Civilization went off the rails when something as simple as a 15 second speed dial became a long Kabuki dance. I text you, and you text me back to tell me it’s OK to call. I wait until I get a text back before calling. Somebody has too much time on their hands to make this nonsense up. Everyone I might remotely want to talk to socially has me on caller ID. If they don’t want to talk or are busy, they merely decline to answer, and their voice mail takes a message. How hard can this be?

As we move to a paperless society, I am seriously wondering if our descendants will know if there was a civilization after 2000. I can imagine some anthropologist by 2224 saying, “It is amazing that they could leave artifacts on the moon without having a written language.” Places like the World Trade Center and the Gateway Arch will raise questions of how an illiterate civilization could construct such wonders without the benefit of sophisticated means of communication. Perhaps there will be a Rosetta Stone–like thing that that will translate emojis into written language so that posterity can decode us.

Having been born in the first half of the last century and become something of a curmudgeon, I don’t personally care if I call someone, and they are offended if I don’t text before I do. I actually don’t call too much because most of my friends still alive don’t care anymore than I, and the children and grandkids won’t have to put up with me much longer anyway.

What goes around generally comes around. The flowering of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment allowed people to again appreciate the goodness of such things as reading, writing, and bathing. It is interesting to contemplate the curiosity of some 13th-century archeologist finding the mummified remains of a modern millennial sitting in his mom’s basement, clutching a game console with a bag of petrified chips at his side, and wondering what strange rites he was performing when he died.

Hopefully, someone can teach me to leave the text equivalent of an answering machine message that says: “Hi, I can’t take your text right now or ever. If you want to contact me, give me a call or send an email. If I’m not dead, I’ll answer or get back to you as soon as I can.”

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