Communication

According to a podcast I was listening to the other day, there's been an industry study into the health of the American telecommunications system. One of its findings is that regular people are abandoning landline phones in droves. Now, that may not sound particularly interesting or surprising in and of itself, but wait until you hear the main reason given by respondents …

Scammers, telemarketers, and various forms of robo-calls.

Apparently, this cloud of pestilence now constitutes more than 50% of all the telephone calls made to US numbers, and people are disconnecting their phones, just to get some peace and quiet. In conjunction, many people now block all calls on their mobile phones from numbers that aren't already in their contacts' list, making the telephone an increasingly unreliable means of reaching someone in The United States.

People are also relying more on email, chat-apps, and social-media sites, to communicate with each other, with businesses, and other non-person entities (such as schools and govt).

On a related note, Facebook is apparently working on massively expanding the services they offer, in an attempt to halt the spread of WeChat outside of Asia. In case you don't know, WeChat is like Chinese Facebook on steroids. On top of all the services Facebook offers, they also offer the complete shopping experience of Amazon … and on top of that, you can also use the app to make phone calls, send text messages, call for a taxi, order food, book tickets, make purchases, pay your bills, book a doctor's appointment, do your banking, and even pay govt fines. For millions of Chinese, WeChat has become the be-all and end-all of the internet, and Facebook are shitting their pants at the prospect of them getting a foothold in the developed world.

In other news, by the time this gets posted, new episodes of Black Mirror should be out.