Advisor: Should chatty cell phone users stick to social networking?

Last month, while waiting to get my typhoid vaccine for travel to Nepal at the immunization clinic in San Francisco, I found myself sitting across from a super chatty thirty-something year old woman with a cell phone. In the next 15 minutes, I learned more about this woman than I ever wanted to know, about ten times over. That’s because she made multiple phone calls in which she had the following conversation, over and over, really frigging loud:

“Hey, it’s ____, I’m getting my flu sot today, you know, because I work near kids, and because I also work around old people. I’ve been running around all day, sorry if I’m talking really fast, it’s just been crazy and I had a lot of caffeine. But hey, do you want to come over for Christmas dinner? I totally understand if you already have plans, and if you don’t end up coming over for Christmas dinner, you’re welcome to come over for wine at my house tonight!”

When I went home and told Brian about it, he said: “She should stick to Twitter.”

Which got me thinking — should she have stuck to Twitter, or is there still value in repeating the same information over and over by voice to give the semblance that the message is personalized? The fact that she was in a clinic waiting room made what she was doing super inappropriate. But her loud annoyingness aside, was her archaic method of inviting people over better than a Tweet, an Evite, a Facebook event, or a mass email?

My two cents is that it, for something as simple as inviting people over for drinks, an email or text message would have been enough — it would have saved her time, saved her friends time, and been easier to respond to. No matter how crazy advanced communication tech becomes, though, for me there will always be value in non-productive phone conversations with people whom I really care about.

Image via Samantha Celera’s Flickr

Advisor is a column about how to juggle technology, relationships, and common sense. Got a story to tell? Email me at lisa [at] boingboing [dot] net.