Don't talk to people on the telephone. Skype/Facetime/videocall them. * insert a long article about the importance of face-to-face communication * Seriously,

Don't talk to people on the telephone. Skype/Facetime/videocall them. * insert a long article about the importance of face-to-face communication * Seriously, though, every technology has a time and a place. It's a sliding scale that goes like this: video calls, voice calls, IM/texts, group/forum posts, emails. One one end you get synchronous communication which has the full attention of both parties. On the other - go at your own pace asynchronous information transfer. I love calling my grandparents on Skype. But I need to be alone in a room for that to work. (Screens and speakers still suck outdoor). I rarely call my parents on Skype, because my mom doesn't like looking bad on camera, and she just wants to chill after work sans make up and what not. So I call her on the phone. But I know her schedule, and I know that I won't be taking here away from something - and that she'll be happy to give me full attention. IM and texts are great when you need to get some information across, but you don't want to take the other party away from whatever setting they are in. While IM/texts work great to talk to many people at once, there is still a sense of immediacy to the conversation. If you want to organize an event, the relevant information will get lost in flurry of messages after a day or two. FB groups / events, and similar, work better for that: communicating in groups, with a latency that spans days. Finally, emails work best when you want to take time to compose a message or a response (sometimes, days), and be able to go back to it a long time afterwards. I have long email threads with some of my friends, months passing between responses sometimes. And obviously, some methods work better than others depending on whether the other party is next door or 7000 miles away, whether they speak your language fluently, etc.