Anthony Hilton: We’ll be losing so much if we stop talking face-to-face

One of the more startling facts to emerge this week is that phones are no longer for talking to people. According to Deloitte, the professional services firm, we are fast reaching the point where more than a quarter of smartphone users will not use their mobile to make a traditional voice call this week, this month nor even this year.

A survey by the firm actually found that one in five of us are there already and never use our mobile to speak to people. That number has doubled since 2012. Deloitte predicts that it will rise again to a quarter this year and if the trend continues there will be almost no smartphone users left talking by 2020.

It obviously won’t work out quite like that — trends never do — but it is still startling to be reminded how much speech has been usurped by texts, Twitter and WhatsApp. And it is more than a little unnerving to think about some of the implications.

On the other hand my kids say I should not be surprised because this has been coming for some time. Google Maps means you no longer need to ask for directions; mobile apps such as Uber mean you no longer need to talk to someone to order a taxi; come to that, apps such as Tinder mean you no longer need to speak to someone to line up a date. And in addition the tariff structure of mobile carriers increasingly has a bias towards data rather than speech.

If you Google “the death of conversation” — a resort to electronic media which is itself not without irony in this context — then you quickly come across thousands of photographs of people separated by their phones.

There are stories of actors on Broadway and in the West End complaining that half the audience is visible, lit up by the eerie glow of their mobiles on their laps as they check their emails while listening — or not — to the play. There is even a London-based photographer called Babycakes Romero (yes, honestly) who has built a global reputation on the back of his work documenting couples in restaurants, on the Tube, waiting for a lift, sitting in the park, all looking at their phones rather than at each other.

But something is being lost which can actually be very useful. Years ago, while interviewing the memorably dull boss of one of our biggest insurance companies, I asked what special qualities he brought to the post, given that none were immediately apparent. What made him specially qualified to run such a large business, he ventured, after a few moments of thought, was his “ability to tell when his colleagues around the boardroom table were saying ‘yes’ but thinking ‘no’.” It warned him which of his ideas were likely to succeed when pushed down through the organisation and which would be doomed to fail. It told him where success lay and where to devote his energies.

You can see why it would be quite useful to spot which colleagues are plotting to stick a knife in your back while claiming to be your new best friend, but in a less extreme form such sensitivity is what so much of management is about. Understanding what makes people tick, sensing what they really want and knowing when they are comfortable and, more importantly, uncomfortable are essential skills if you are ever going to get the best out of the people working in the organisation and generate the ideas and enthusiasm the business needs to grow.

But the ability to read body language is honed by a lifetime of talking to people, looking closely at them, listening to what they emphasise, looking them in the eye and observing how they actually behave. It is not learned by sending texts.

Quite the opposite. To communicate by text or email is to enter a world of urgency and often one of anger, of question and answer. The format is simply not geared for patience, tolerance, sensitivity or the understanding of nuance which is part and parcel of a face-to-face conversation, even one that addresses the same topic.