On March 10, 1876, Alexander Bell spoke to his assistant through a device, asking him to come to his study, and was rather surprised to see the boy appear a few minutes later. The first phone call in human history had just taken place. Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago, people stopped sending messengers on horseback and started picking up the receiver—literally, back then—to speak to someone.
A century and a half later, the object that was simply meant to carry other people’s voices to us and deliver ours to them has become a permanent center of gravity—Franco, forgive me. It sleeps on the bedside table, follows us into the bathroom, climbs onto the bed, becomes the extra diner at the table, stands with us in line, on our commutes, in our waiting, at work, and even during breaks from work. We run our fingers over it constantly, keep everything inside it; it has become the girl your partner checks out while talking to you. It clogs up our lives to such an extent that there are detox centers devoted to it, and yet its original function—the one inaugurated by Bell—is the one we avoid most of all.
Why don’t we want to talk to each other in real time anymore? Why does a phone call now feel more and more like an eccentric act, almost an intrusive one? And yet the telephone was born for the voice, as a radical break with distance, as a way of transmitting not just information, but our presence.
For us today, distance is simply something technology ought to be able to abolish, but in the nineteenth century the telephone represented the irruption of immediacy into a world still accustomed to waiting for a letter, delivered after who knows how many miles of travel. It is no surprise that Thomas Edison described it as an invention that had annihilated time and space. Not by chance, by the beginning of the twentieth century there were already millions of telephones, and the voice had found its network.In the decades that followed, an almost theatrical ritual was built around the telephone: the ring, the waiting, the greeting, the suspension of everything else. Even cinema understood that a visceral change was underway in society. From Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), in which the protagonist entrusts the murder of his wife to the ritual of answering the phone, to Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), in which the bizarre relationship between the two protagonists begins out of the need to make a phone call, all the way to the many times Mastroianni calls or answers in the films of Antonioni and Fellini that did so much to consecrate Italian cinema. For a long time, the telephone enjoyed an almost moral clarity: it promised one thing, and that is exactly what it did. It made the absent present. Its cultural value lay entirely in turning distance into simultaneity.
Then we turned it into a mobile, personal, pervasive object—and, if you like, a better one. Between your grandmother’s landline, the one with the rotary dial you spun to compose the number, and Google’s latest model, which at Charles de Gaulle Airport can practically focus in on the Eiffel Tower, there was a decisive intermediate phase that today I would call nostalgic: the good old Nokia. Between the late 1980s and all through the 1990s, the phone stopped being a shared household object and became private, portable, and pocket-sized. It still was not a smartphone—those were the days—but it was already something radically new compared to the landline, because it broke the bond between communication and place. To have a conversation, you no longer had to be in that place at that time; you could be anywhere, at any moment.
I remember being little and playing with my grandmother’s landline—black and incredibly heavy—dialing my home number with my index finger; when I got to nine it was agony, because the dial took forever to spin all the way back. I remember, in elementary school, wanting to be like the presidents facing national emergencies I saw in the movies, pulling up the black antenna on my mother’s first cell phone and clearing my throat as I brought it to my ear. Or later, when I was older, playing Snake on my father’s orange Nokia, with its gray rubber buttons, already far easier to handle than the other two. By the time I was in high school, smartphones arrived, and something changed: the phone did not just become better than the ones that came before it; it became something other than them.
I hope you will forgive this not especially lofty comparison, but I think it is incredibly apt. Do you remember the handbag Hermione carries around in the last two Harry Potter films, when she and her two worthy companions are forced to wander far and wide and, being the farsighted person she is, she thinks of a portable object that can contain all the others, so that it can be useful in every possible situation? Well, the fact that the bag in question is—sadly—not a real object hardly matters. What matters is what it can hold without the slightest bulk: everything. And I ask you, does the phone not do the same for us? Newspapers, the bank, maps, the camera, the calendar, work, the fling, the archive, the wallet, the taxi, documents, boarding passes, family, the lover, the office’s diplomatic crises, relationship anxieties, friends’ voice notes, social media to distract us, Trump’s threats, restaurant reservations, concert tickets, gym class schedules, the app to pay for parking, all the music in the world, confessions made at night. The only substantial difference I can think of? Rowling’s character reaches for the handbag only in cases of necessity, not out of boredom. But that is another story.
In the United States, 91 percent of adults own a smartphone, and half of teenagers say they are online “almost constantly.” We have never used the phone this much. We use it so much that the word itself is no longer enough to describe it—indeed, it is almost misleading. Because the word telephone comes from Greek: phonē, meaning sound, and tēle, meaning far away. Distant sound. Does that seem in any way comparable to the object you are holding in your hand? Broadly speaking, no. And the reason we no longer make phone calls so often is that the real transformation from the old Nokia to current models was the absorption of the object into a much wider system of practices. We live too much inside the phone for the phone call to remain central. Its original function has been relativized by a flood of other functions competing for our attention and, above all, for shaping our relationships.
This was precisely the meaning of The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan’s formula, quoted to the point of exhaustion but rarely taken fully seriously. For McLuhan, one of the greatest sociologists of our time, the message of a medium is not the content it carries, but rather the change in scale, rhythm, and pattern that the medium introduces into our lives. More radically still, it is now clear that the medium shapes and controls the form of our actions and relationships. Here lies the paradox: the moment the phone became total and all-consuming, the live call started to frighten us.
Why do so many of us prefer a message—or even a ten-minute voice note, yes, we send them, we know—to a three-minute call? It is simple: calling is a form of exposure. A call demands simultaneity. It reaches you now, whatever it is you are doing. It requires real attention, and improvisation. It requires knowing how to manage silence, the risk of using the wrong tone, the confrontation with the other person’s emotions in real time. A message or a voice note does not. They can be rehearsed, deleted, rewritten, rerecorded, measured out, postponed. They allow us to be there without being entirely there, in perfect keeping with the chaotic lives we live.
Sherry Turkle, the American sociologist and psychologist who studies the relationship between human beings and technology, put it bluntly: I’d rather text than talk. Her pioneering work on how we converse insists on one crucial point: if we write instead of speak, we can have others in quantities we can control. If we write, we can measure; if we speak, what is said cannot be governed with the same precision. It is an observation of great importance for reading the present, because it makes clear that no longer calling is not a retreat from communication, but a migration toward less vulnerable forms of communication. We are not communicating less; we are communicating in a more protected way.
The question is: why? Why, at a historical moment in which we are constantly exposed, do we feel so fragile? As early as 2007, an essay entitled Text or Talk? had already tried to answer the question, drawing attention to the fact that social anxiety and loneliness could influence the preference for texting over calling. The essence of it? Text messages and voice notes are psychologically more inhabitable. The text protects us. The voice note protects us a little less, but still enough. Video exposes us more. Face-to-face interaction most of all.
The voice note in particular is one of the most interesting developments of recent years, because we have essentially invented a format that preserves our voice—its timbre, breath, irony, fatigue, urgency, affection—while giving up synchronicity. This phenomenon becomes even clearer if we look at how the temporality of communication has changed. The chats we use are not slow like a letter or an email, but they do not require the full simultaneity of a phone call either. They are immediate enough to create a sense of presence, yet elastic enough not to demand exclusive attention. It is the perfect format for our lives, made up of fragmentation, constant interruptions, overlap, and sudden shifts of context. It seems that our idea of closeness no longer coincides with real-time availability.
We accept that we and the people we are talking to exist in a permanent state of absent presence. We are at the table, but also somewhere else; we are in a meeting, but also inside a chat; we are with someone, but always slightly elsewhere. And perhaps that is exactly what makes the call more demanding: the fact that it requires a concentration that the chaos we are immersed in is constantly sabotaging. There is clearly a cognitive element at stake, because we are now accustomed to managing several channels at once, to being able to respond to others without entirely abandoning what we are doing. While the voice note and the message slip in among all the other things on our hands, the call interrupts the flow; we perceive it almost as a micro-violence.
If you think about it, on old telephones the voice was the event, whereas on today’s phones it is mostly a file in circulation, one that can be forwarded to others—without our knowledge—and that we can listen to at x2 speed. Even the voice, in the current economy of our lives, has adapted to the logic of on-demand.
What is it that our present can no longer tolerate about real-time communication? Perhaps the fact that a phone call, like face-to-face interaction, remains one of the last places where not everything can be controlled.
In a society dominated by self-curation, glossy profiles, and the idea that everything must be corrected before being shown, the call preserves a residue of real life. And that is why it is avoided—and exactly why, deep down, we cannot do without it.
Beatrice Galluzzo