Generation Silence?

It’s official: after decades that have seen the growth of a multi-million dollar ringtone industry, more and more young people now leave their smartphones permanently muted, in vibration mode, and very much distancing themselves from “old folks” and their corny downloads or standard-issue ringtones. So, next time you hear a phone ringing or an annoyingly loud video played on a smartphone at deafening volume, the culprit will likely be somebody more than old enough to know better.

There are a number of factors in play here: on the one hand, the telephone call is now seen by many young people as an outdated form of communication. For several years now, the cognoscenti only use phone calls for emergencies, preferring instant messaging or voice messages. This is why growing number of people no longer hold their device to their ear, and instead hold it away from the face in a horizontal position, keeping the microphone close to the mouth.

At the same time, we have to take into account media consumption models: young people consume large amounts of video on networks such as Instagram or TikTok. To do this, they either use headphones, use of which has multiplied after the success of Airpods and their infinite imitators, or subtitles: the use of automated generation subtitles on TikTok has grown hugely, an option once reserved solely for foreign-language films. In many cases, this is associated with multichannel modes of consumption, such as watching videos while channel surfing or doing other things.

What’s more, young people are either holding their smartphone or have it in front of them, meaning that keeping it on vibrate mode throughout the day does not necessarily mean missing notifications. And if they do miss them, that’s okay too: the patterns and protocols of communication via instant messaging differ greatly among younger users, who don’t bother with hello or goodbye, but keep channels open at all times and enter and exit conversations as their circumstances allow, versus those of people from previous generations who, on many occasions, find themselves uncomfortable looking for a conventional form of goodbye that is not abrupt, or annoyed if their interlocutor leaves the conversation halfway through.

These consumption patterns seem to be here to stay: China is trying to “protect” its younger users from excessive use of TikTok and similar apps and has set a maximum time limit of forty minutes a day, while Shopify has announces an agreement with the Chinese company so that brands can offer their products through it, the hashtag #tiktokmademebuyit appears in more than 4.6 billion views, and Google is striving to reach agreements with both Instagram and TikTok so that videos generated by these apps can appear in their searches if their authors so wish. Everything indicates that an increasingly significant part of the contents that reach viral circulation are generated via these kinds of apps, hence Google’s eagerness to stay relevant, especially for a generation that has grown accustomed to consuming them 24/7.

If the trend spreads upward through the generations, perhaps we will finally no longer have to suffer phone calls and notifications interrupting meetings and other public events.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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