When the clock strikes midnight, and the 25th of December rolls around, billions of people around the world start tearing open packages from their friends, family, and of course Santa Claus, but they also try to get in touch with the people who couldn’t be there to celebrate the holidays with them. It used to be that we called each other, but since the invention of SMS it’s simply much more convenient to write one “Merry Christmas!” text message and then send it to your entire address book. Something strange happened this past Christmas however; the number of text messages sent and received dropped in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. Who is to blame? Facebook, Twitter, and good old fashioned voice calling. That’s right, people actually called each other more this year than they did the last. It’s a trend that I hope picks up in other parts of the world since hearing someone’s voice, even if it’s just to have a 90 second conversation, is infinitely more pleasurable than reading letters rendered on a screen.
The actual figures: 4 million fewer texts were sent in Sweden, 1 million fewer in Denmark, 5 million fewer in Norway, and 1.1 million in the Czech Republic. How did you get in touch with people this Christmas? Did you even bother getting in touch at all? The holidays have become a time where I look forward to turning off my laptop and mobile phone, and I suspect that’s only going to become more common as people begin to question their relationship to the internet and technology in general. You’re going to be on your social network of choice the next day anyway, so that’s the appropriate time to brag about what you got, and whine about what you didn’t get.