FaceTime Conversations

For my second experiment in breaking social media ideology, I tried an experiment of my own. For me, my main form of online communication is texting. I text my friends and family throughout the day when I have a question or want to tell them something funny that happened to me and they aren't around. When I want to have a more comprehensive conversation with my parents, I call them--I usually do this about once a week. But, other than that, my main form of online communication between me and my friends is texting. Even my high school friends that I rarely see choose to catch up via text rather than any other form of communication when we are away at school.

I decided to challenge this form of communication by FaceTiming with people whenever I needed to contact them--whether high priority or not. I decided to keep this experiment contained to my closer friends and family, just because I was scared of the awkwardness that could ensue from FaceTiming an acquaintance for a short amount of time over something small. The responses I received were pretty funny. A lot of the times, people didn't respond at first--they assumed me FaceTiming them was a mistake. I would usually then receive a text, asking if I meant to FaceTime them. After I would receive this text, I would FaceTime them again.

I found that once I started talking to them, my friends' confusion was overshadowed by the conversation at hand and they didn't feel the need to question me. I often found that FaceTiming my friends caused an otherwise short and succinct conversation over text to be longer and more tangential. Seeing each other talking face-to-face (through screens) made people pay more attention to me--they responded more promptly than a text and they responded more substantially. I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I've actually been receiving more FaceTime calls after I tried this out for a couple of days. Now, once in a while, some of my good friends FaceTime me randomly to talk.