A story was shared with me about a friend who had recently decided to rid himself of the email application on his smartphone. He nostalgically mentioned how he used to enjoy returning home to see several new emails waiting for him. It make me feel somewhat nostalgic as well. A time when emails were not just messages, they were electronic letters rich with updates on their lives and elaborate narratives.
Before short messaging services became the norm, emails were a quick way to stay connected. These emails had structure, sentences, paragraphs and often carefully crafted ideas. The era where a simple ‘okay’ or a thumbs-up emoji wasn’t defined as communication seemed far behind us.
Whenever I hear that someone has chosen to delete an application from their device, it fills me with a certain amount of anticipation. It’s a small step, indeed, but it’s a move towards spending less time engrossed in our phones. Although the step may be microscopic, it’s still indicative of the intent to regain control over our personal time from these attention-grabbing devices, which is always a progression in the right direction.
But I find myself intrigued by steps that can reintroduce us to the allure of communication before our lives became smartphone-centric. I find myself longing for the time when traditional letter writing was not an antiquated practice and voice mails were seen as a miraculous innovation.
I have often reminisced about my fondness for phone booths, and how if we could, we should adopt some of their implicit rules and bring them into the present era. For instance, maintaining the sanctity of our personal conversations by confining them to private spaces.
While we may yearn for simpler times, reintroducing past practices is often challenging. Deleting your email app from your phone could potentially eliminate the obsession to continually monitor it, yet that doesn’t provide assurance you’ll return home to a mailbox brimming with substantive correspondence from loved ones. The fact is, these messages are usually replaced by constant texts during the day and an inbox that’s predominantly filled with spam and bills.
In my personal endeavor to decrease my reliance on my phone, I once proposed an idea to a friend. Instead of continually exchanging texts, we should send postcards to each other. Our experiment lasted about a week, after which we conceded that it wasn’t a practical alternative for regular chitchat.
I acknowledged the metaphorical nature of our experiment from the beginning. It wasn’t intended to replace our texting entirely, but merely to introduce some variety with something more tactile and emotive. However, I did harbor hopes that the charm of receiving a tangible postcard would create a simultaneous stream of more thoughtful communication. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case.
Not too long ago, I decided to call a friend out of the blue, someone I had never conversed with over the phone. The act felt somewhat bold and perhaps a smidge impolite, but the absurdity of that feeling further sparked my desire to make the call.
The idea that making a straightforward phone call could be considered contentious is funny in itself, isn’t it? Instead, it should feel gratifying that a friend was thinking about you and took the initiative to reach out and connect.