If you were born after 1980, you probably don’t know what freedom we had without cell phones, nor do you know a world in which your mother and father, brother, best friends, and cousins would call — without warning! — at all times of the day, requiring you to sit down for a while as you engaged in conversation.  Speaking to someone while driving a car was reserved for Dick Tracy and the überwealthy.

My mother used to call me every day or every other day, just to say hello.  “Hi, Em?  How you doing?  Ok?  Good. Well….”  She started every phone conversation the same way.  My father called me every couple of days, and if I called him, he’d tell me to hang up so I wouldn’t have to shoulder the toll call, which could amount to five bucks or so, which was a lot when the minimum wage was $3.10 / hour.  But it was my father.  I was willing to spend whatever I had to spend.

If the phone rang when friends and I were playing records and being loud, we’d stop the music and everyone would quiet down a bit while the person being called spent time saying whatever he or she had to say.  We almost never let a call go to an answering machine, because it was rude, unless it was too early or too late to talk.

For a while, email took the place of the telephone, except for those over 50.  Then email quickly succumbed to the needs of advertisers and spammers, so we all stopped writing emails.  Texts put the stake in the heart of email.

I am as guilty as anyone else for this abandonment of regular communication.  And no, text messages do not replace a written letter, a phone call, or even an email.  But my phone lies quietly in my pocket, a phone call maybe once every week, frequent IMs from Facebook, texts.  But I don’t hear the voices.  I don’t feel like we’re communicating.  Communication has crashed and we’re just now beginning to see the social ramifications of that.