The New York Times has been outdoing itself lately with the pseudo trend stories. Now, the latest: Still using voice mail? Then you're a dithering old fart. Because nobody under 25 uses voicemail anymore—it's all texting and Twitter and Facebook. Voicemail is for your mom. Voicemail is for the senile. Voicemail is for losers.
And, like all the Times' pseudo trend stories, the evidence is entirely anecdotal. Note the disclaimer:
There are no definitive studies of how many voice mail messages American leave compared with earlier periods, but if the technology is heading toward obsolescence — as many communication experts suspect — the trend is being driven by young people. Again and again, people under 25 recount returning calls from older colleagues and family members without bothering to listen to messages first.
"The trend is being driven by young people." Novel, that. And then the writer—Jill Colvin, who is a reporter for the Columbia news service (what?)—rolls out the repetitive quotes from random bunch of "voice mail phobic" young'uns (who, by the way, wouldn't dream of rendering voicemail as two words, or bother putting a hyphen in email—e-mail—like the cutting-edge Times does) brattily declaring that they're all too busy to bother with the exhausting procedure of dialing in and entering a code and, sigh, listening to some clueless old luddite actually utilizing this hopelessly outdated technology.
I'll tell you what's exhausting: Scrolling down as you read a Times' pseudo trend story and seeing that NEXT PAGE box lurking down there. If a trend piece needs a click through, it's too long. Somebody needs to edit that thing. Except, oh, that's right, editors are obsolete!
It's a shame, really, that the Times is compelled to infuse every pseudo trend story with that "it's a generational thing" argument, because I, an old'un in the Times' book, hate voicemail too. Well, love/hate, really, because I love letting calls go to voicemail when I'm too busy to talk or when it's a number I don't know or when it's just plain inconvenient to answer the phonel. But I hate it like a twentysomething when people commit voicemail abuse and just start talking as if they've actually reached you in person, like my mother used to do (I think everyone's mother does) and this one friend of mine who makes me seethe with his infernally long messages second-guessing why I'm not home ("You're probably at the gym or maybe you're out shopping or maybe you're having lunch...") and then dictating his whole schedule for the week and the specific windows available to reach him. I also hate those precious seconds wasted when reaching someone else's voicemail and being instructed after over a decade of cell phone saturation to "Leave a message after the tone; to leave a callback number, press 5" and the truly egregious "To end your call, hang up or press 1 for more options." What options? To send up a flare?
But I'm not a young person, so who cares what I think? Certainly not the Times. It only matters what the under-25s think—the same demographic, by the way, who think the New York Times is obsolete.
NYT: You've Got Voice Mail, but Do You Care?
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