Telephone as main form of communication

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i hate it at work when someone who is 20 seconds walk away phones me. I always walk over to them rather than phone.

We're the exact opposite, Serenity. My phone calls are usually short and to the point. Business-related calls, with a definite purpose and then done, are my preference. It's the long, rambling social calls with no real purpose that annoy me.

Email's best for me, because I can send/receive when I feel ready to, and I can take as long as I need to. Nobody can interrupt me or be brash and intimidating, and if I think I'm pulling my punches, talking past the point, being irrelevent, losing my temper, overstating my case, or not making myself clear, I can edit the stuff until I'm happy with it, or go and do something else for a while till I'm in the right mood. It's amazing how much better I can be on a "second pass" - sometimes at first glance I can think an email quite impossible to reply to properly, but if I just take a break and let the ideas percolate into my brain, then it can magically become a lot clearer how I should respond. I need time, you see. I can't just wax lyrical to order. Sometimes I have to chew an idea over for a day or two before I'm ready to address it. I hardly ever communicate as well with the spoken word or with any of those other quick forms of dialogue.

It's a pity though, because I can see how much quicker it would be to talk face-to-face........in theory face-to-face (etc) is better because each person has the opportunity to immediately put things straight, for example if I start telling somebody a thing that they already know (or don't need to know), they can say "no I know that, but...." or "yes but what I really want to know is...." or if I start saying things they find upsetting then they can indicate that. All that can be achieved by email, but it would take a lot longer. There's a great example of how it can go wrong with snail mail, in a book by Woody Allen called "Getting Even" - it's 2 guys playing postal chess and because they can't see the board, they begin to disagree about where the pieces are, and each ends up thinking the other is insane.

The other advantage of face-to-face is that nobody can easily dodge questions or otherwise duck out of the dialogue. If you don't reply to an email, you can always blame it on your service provider, but if somebody asks a question to your face, then it's a lot more obvious if you're ignoring it. So I think it does make for greater honesty in some ways, and it's not without reason that a lot of people feel slightly suspicious about a person who doesn't seem to want to communicate that way. I'm sure that email etc. can be used to deceive.

In the days before the Web, my experience was that to influence somebody, sending a letter would have a weak effect, phoning them would have a nedium effect, and visiting them would have a strong effect. It always seemed to be that way with marketing and with attracting the opposite sex. So I suppose my Aspie disabilities can't have been all that much of a problem, at least when I was strongly motivated. When I'm strongly motivated I don't usually feel a lot of fatigue or anxiety (as long as I don't have to continue for too long), and in spite of being generally poor at face-to-face and telephones, if I prepare myself well then I can be surprisingly successful with those methods.

One thing I hate is when I phone somebody and they arrange to call me back.....because when they do, I'm nearly always focussing on something totally different by then, and just can't pull my brain out of one subject and into another at the drop of a hat. I seem to need things to happen at the right rate and at the right time before I can really get the best out of them. People seem to pick up that something's wrong and I think they tend to conclude that I'm not interested in them.

It can be nice to email a person AND meet them.......the emailed stuff is a great backup for making sure the more important unvoiced ideas don't fall by the wayside. Once or twice that's gone wrong, when the emailed stuff has become too detached from the spoken stuff, so it starts to feel like the email person and the real-life person are two different people, which feels very unnatural. But if the spoken stuff refers to the emailed stuff so that the two media are working together in harmony, it gets pretty good.

As for those other things, I don't use instant messaging or chat rooms, not even texting via mobile phone unless it's the only way there is. I feel really handicapped with those methods, probably because I haven't sussed out how to use them properly yet. I tend to put them down as "kid's stuff" which is probably wrong of me, as I'm sure they've got a lot going for them. I have a very strong feeling that communication is a real blessing, and the more forms of it we can use, the better life gets. Not that there's no place for solitude of course. I'd probably go completely ape if I couldn't shut it all out from time to time.

Mostly depends on the purpose. For work and business, email all the way. IM beats the phone unless I need the full bandwidth of voice communication. For close friends and family, face to face is always preferred, but phone is next best. For casual friends email or even Facebook since phone conversations tend to just hang (heck, even face to face interactions tend to). I like email because I can precisely express myself and my difficulties with tone of voice and facial expressions don't come into play.

E-mail is my preference as i can take my own time to what to type don't mind face to face but i don't particularly like using the phone as i find it far to unpredictable and is a weakness for me.

I prefer instant messaging and face to face. I hate phones

Email or IM is better for me.

I can't stand talking on the phone, or even talking to people face-to-face, although the latter is the lesser of two evils, IMO.

I voted face-to-face, but yes, it does depend. Face-to-face for friends and family (I can read some non-verbal messages of folks I know well), e-mail for business (you have a record of the communication and you can compose your thoughts without pressure). Just don't like the phone, actually prefer getting the answering machine. I usually have my little spiel rehearsed and happily will lay down my message. I might freeze up if an actual person answered! I wish some of my elderly relatives used computers, since it would be fun to send them pictures and links, but though they have computers, they just don't use them.

Yes I'm not the only one to vote face to face! email may be easier but I get much more out of life interacting face to face.

I prefer the phone or email, depending on context. Like others said, email has the advantage of letting me think through and write out exactly what I want to say. This is how I communicate for business purposes, and with one family member.

But other people have told me that email is cold, impersonal, and inappropriate for friends. So if I want to communicate with a friend, I use the telephone because I think it levels the perceptual field to some degree. I also only make or receive calls when I'm in the mood to talk.

With face-to-face communication I know I am missing a lot, and that form of communication has the highest error rate for me. So I prefer not to use it. I also find most conversation tedious and trivial, assuming I can even follow the conversation. Sometimes I lack the information relevant to the content and context of the conversation I'm a part of, so I pretend to listen and think about things that interest me.

I like the idea of interacting with people, but I know from decades of experience that I will be frustrated and drained afterward, so I tend to keep face-to-face activities to a minimum.

Gah no! The phone is the worst! I hate the sound of a phone ringing. I let it go to voicemail and then reply by e-mail. In-person talk is preferable to a phone call.

E-mail is my favorite.

I don't like the telephone either. It's intrusive, a major disrupter of peace and quiet. Call me rude or lazy but I HATE HATE HATE having to drop something I'm in the middle of doing to rush over and get the phone. I simply refuse. I'll listen to voice mail and call back later.

I'd much rather talk to someone in person than over the phone. I also prefer email.

Split between phone and e-mail.
It depends on who the communication is with and why it is needed.

Ability to think out and arrange/rearrange email is very much a plus for it.
And I can write it while the thoughts are in my head without having to wait to call or meet a person.
And the recipient can read and respond whenever they are able.
And you can go back later and see what the conversation was.


With near relatives prefer telephone. But then . . . when something pops into my head at this time of night 1:56 AM, they'd probably not like a phone call, ya know.

I don't use telephones unless I have too. Never been the type to talk a while on the phone.

I tend to feel more comfortable if I'm instant messaging someone, even though I hardly ever use it (logged in 4 times in the past 2 years). I used to do it all the time, but I'd prefer to have a face-to-face conversation because even though I'm terrible at it and end up feeling sh***y afterwards, I feel it is the most rewarding form of communication on a personal level.

i prefer online communication, i have a cell phone but dont really use it all that much