Letting our fingers do the talking [telecom]

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Letting our fingers do the talking For young, old alike, texting becoming more common than a call

By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff | September 25, 2010

When Mandy Goldman was growing up, every morning started the same way. Her mother, Joy Leone, got on the telephone at 7 a.m. and chatted with Mary, her best friend in Burlington.

"For at least an hour. Pretty much every day of my life,'' said Goldman, 31, a Brookline hair stylist who grew up in Natick. "She'd be screaming at us to wake up in poor Mary's ear.''

Like mother, like daughter - sort of. Goldman, the mother of two little boys, uses her phone a lot, too. But Goldman has a multifunction smartphone, and it hardly ever occurs to her to talk on it. When Goldman, who is pregnant, learned a month ago that she was having another boy, she promptly reached for her phone to send Facebook messages to 20 of her friends. She had 20 responses within a half-hour. "No one called me, at all,'' she said. "It was all on Facebook.''

This illustrates why some people predict the phone call will soon be dead. Almost everyone has a cellphone these days, yet, increasingly, we use them to do everything but make calls.

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