Technology certainly has changed social communication and interaction in the last twenty years more than it has in the last one hundred. With email, social networking sites, mobile phones, visuals and texting, people interact with strangers as well as family and friends on a regular basis, at all hours of the day.
Even as we communicate more openly and freely with others across the globe via gadgets, we also have to face the reality that some real people, well, aren’t.
We got used to the automatic voice messages a few years back. Particularly when trying to call for a service via the telephone. A voice recording gave us instructions as to which button to press next, and next, and next, and next, until we were routed to our proper responding department or learned the trick of punching the zero to get the only real person available–the operator.
The last couple years have added something new. The automated voice that calls us. Political campaigners aplenty, solicitors, even our own doctors’ offices to remind of an appointment. While this is a huge change in how society communicates there are even more subtle changes that aren’t considered.
Once upon a time, if you had a pleasant telephone voice, you were admired. Nowadays, it can become your downfall. I’ve gotten so tired of feeling the fool when answering the phone and responding to a recording that if there’s a pleasantly trained, perfectly grammatically correct and clear voice that starts a spiel right after my greeting, I hang up without further ado.
I just did that a couple minutes ago. Then a feeling came over me that wait, what if it was a real person? Some poor schlock getting paid minimum wage to make a thousand phone calls a day? Now yes, I eventually hang up on these wretched folk too, but not without at the least a polite “sorry, I’m not interested,” — which I just did a second ago, to “Andy” obviously from India. Andy at least got a human response from me because he wasn’t merely a recording. I sure hope the lady that called before him wasn’t a real person too.
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