Depends on the case, but yeah, those extra emotional cues are very important to me now.
My business consultant, a retired SV engineer & entrepreneur, has been incessantly reminding me, "make that one a phone call, not an email," for four years now. And he's absolutely right. Many situations jut work better when people can hear your voice and v/v. I feel I can communicate far more effectively over the phone in many cases than I can via email. Any time you could do with some extra empathy, e.g. during negotiations, introductions, heavy procrastination, tense moments--you pick up the phone and the extra boost is like getting free money compared to email.
I feel exactly the opposite. All my life I've felt clumsy with spoken words. I much prefer to write.
Writing gives me time to think and to edit and to find the odd word that eludes me.
I do realise that not everybody feels this way. Many of my friends hate writing and will basically ignore important emails as if they had never existed.
Perhaps you're too hard on yourself with regard to spoken words. Keep in mind that these are technologies. The phone is a form of technology that you can use to communicate. It will have pros/cons compared to email. And using it effectively is a skill that can be learned.
I often hire subcontractors and I cannot tell you how much I wish they would just call me when they fall behind, rather than emailing or texting about everything. It turns a bad situation into an even worse situation, where on at least one side of the conversation, there is an extra question mark or exclamation point behind every piece of punctuation. In contrast, some of the most effective people I know will call whenever there is any kind of a speed bump, because they recognize the potential advantages of a voice conversation. It's there for anybody to use, and it doesn't really care if we use it or not, but the phone has its advantages.
"Writing gives me time to think and to edit and to find the odd word that eludes me."
That's great and all, but you're now just talking about you and your thoughts - the core of a publication, not the 'us' that's the basis of conversation.
You're talking about your needs and your comfort level. What about the needs and comfort of the recipient/reader?
do you also prefer turn based(or pause-able real-time) games to real time games?
continueing the calls vs messages thing..face to face is even worse..i always want to say something like 'can you email all that you said just now' or i'll email something like 'as discussed in the meeting..'..i mean..can they put it all down or writing so that i can refer to and think about it?
i mean, often in meetings, you just need to digress..then ask 'where were we?' and half the people can't recall..if its like that, why meet?
yea, i know some people that say tl:dr about long emails too..
To be clear, I love talking on the phone or in person with people. But I really hate voice messages. It feels like a chore to listen to them. I'm honestly not sure why.
It's not that simple. Radio works fine. I think voice messages are a horrible match for the phone system for some reason -- maybe because we're conditioned to talking to a hand-set means synchronous communication.
Maybe it'd be an intersting experiment to have a group of people go into one of two booths -- one with a smart phone/hand set -- one rigged like a recording studio -- and ask them to record an imaginary message to "... eg: a family member" -- and see how/if the messages differed?
Also see my comment up-thread about snail mail and cassette tapes.
The thing is that many of the advantages of a phone call (and in-person talking) over email etc are due to the very low-latency and the ability to quickly react to nuances and adjust what you're saying to reflect them.
A voice message basically does not have any of that.
Certainly it will have some advantages over text, but a voice message isn't a phone call.
