craigmcn

Somewhere along the way, calling someone stopped being the direct route and became the thing you ask permission for first. “Can I call you?” is now its own genre of text message, a small diplomatic overture that exists purely to avoid the crime of making someone’s phone ring without warning. It’s a strange inversion. The tool built to remove friction from communication now requires a scheduling step before you’re allowed to use it, and the step itself often takes longer than the call would have.

Some of this is generational, and neither side seems to notice they’re negotiating from different rulebooks. Older relatives still call cold, the way phones were designed to be used, and mean nothing by it. Younger people receive that same call as an intrusion, sometimes a mildly alarming one, because their entire communication life has trained them to expect warning and context before a live conversation. Neither position is wrong exactly. They’re just answering to different defaults, and the friction shows up whenever the two collide, usually at a family dinner where someone’s phone rings and half the table flinches.

Then there’s the public conduct layer, which is its own quiet battlefield. Speakerphone on a train, a video call answered in a waiting room, someone narrating their entire day to a phone propped against a coffee cup: these aren’t new behaviours so much as newly visible ones, and the etiquette hasn’t caught up to how normalized they’ve become for the person doing it and how grating they remain for everyone nearby. We used to have a shared sense that phone calls belonged in private or at least in a lowered voice. That sense didn’t survive contact with headphones and unlimited data.

What’s actually happened is that we’ve built an entire unwritten rulebook around a device that used to need none. Ask before calling. Text before speaking. Headphones before speakerphone. Every one of these rules exists to manage a discomfort that wasn’t there fifty years ago, and every one of them adds a step between the impulse to talk to someone and actually doing it. That’s not etiquette maturing. That’s a tool quietly losing the thing that made it useful in the first place.