The lost art of having a chat: what happened when I stopped texting and started talking

We are more connected than ever, but we rarely seem to really speak to each other. So, Rebecca Nicholson decided to try

Like most people I know, my Weekly Screen Report is obscene. Every Sunday, when the notification pops up to tell me the hours I have wasted, mostly texting, I think about all the things I could have done. Finished Middlemarch. Started Middlemarch. But as I have my phone in my hand, I scroll through Instagram instead. I send an article or a joke to a friend, a picture of the dog to the family WhatsApp, catch up on someone else's night out. Recently, I clocked up - and I'm ashamed as I write this - six hours and 29 minutes of phone usage in a single day. I have had days where I've barely been awake that long. Messages is my most used app. I am talking all the time.

But I am rarely talking. For the chatterboxes among us, this is a time of upheaval. The long, spontaneous chat on the phone is going the way of the fax. The percentage of households with a landline that's used to make calls is declining every year, from 83% in 2016 to 73% in 2019; the number of calls made on house phones plummeted by 17% in 2018 alone. We still use our mobiles to talk - in 2018, Ofcom surveyed mobile users for three months and found only 6% of them never made a single call - but we are not talking in any great depth. The same study found that over 80% of calls were shorter than five minutes, and the majority were under 90 seconds. I looked at my own recent call list: three minutes, two minutes, five minutes at a push. What can you say in that time? You can only make the point you've called to make.