“Call your family, call your friends, Call em. Don’t text. Don’t email!.” 

According to The Radicati Group (Palo Alto, California), a technology market research firm more than 36 billion outbound messages are sent in a day while 18 billion inbound messages are received each day. That equates to 50 billion text messages sent over WhatsApp each and every day. Also for over 100 billion emails sent and received per day, and the total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase from nearly 3.9 billion accounts in 2013 to over 4.9 billion accounts by the end of 2017. That means e-mails remain the predominant form of communication in the business space. This trend is expected to continue, and business email will account for over 132 billion emails sent and received per day by the end of 2017. What does this mean? Well according to clinical psychologist and Ms. Magazine’s Women of the Year Sherry Turkle (TED) (Alone Together), of whom I already wrote 2 yrs. ago (Is Facebook making us lonely?): “My concern is a psychological dependence. We lose each other because we hide behind our machines” And: “It might take us to places we don’t want to go — “to a state where we consider it normal to interrupt conversations with the people around us to turn to the people on our phones.” Turkle almost finished with her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (PREORDER) –  "how a flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity and productivity — and why reclaiming face-to-face conversations can help us regain lost ground.“ Even the 60-year-old actor J.K. Simmons (VIDEO) urged people to call there parents more, this in his time-limited Oscar speech of 2015, this simply encourage people to have more human interaction: “And if I may, call your mom, everybody. I’ve told this [to], like, a billion people, or so. Call your mom, call your dad. If you’re lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call ‘em. Don’t text. Don’t email. Call them on the phone. Tell ‘em you love ‘em, and thank them, and listen to them for as long as they want to talk to you.” So it’s not only me anymore that feels that we have come to a better understanding of where our technology is taking us right now. I hereby reclaim ‘The Art of the conversation’ back!!! (TheAtlantic) Join me in this quest folks! Let’s bring the Phone call back! Photo Credit: Sherry Turkle. SHARING=CARING!