Phoning home?

A colleague (and relatively new hire) made a very interesting observation this morning. She gestured to the telephone on her desk and said, "We never use this much at this company. We use email, IM and the wiki instead."

Indeed we do. I use the phone on my desk for the odd conference call or training session, but I almost never pick up the phone to call someone for any other reason -- to just say hello, to ask a question, etc. When I want to talk to someone in the office, I walk over and say hello, or, yes, I send them an email or IM.

The comment made me think of something I heard on the BBC on the drive to work today: an interview with an author who claims that technology is killing the fine art of conversation.

Is the author correct? Or are we just having different sorts of conversations these days? What if the phone call does become a dinosaur in the workplace? (I have a preteen daughter, so I know -- to adapt a phrase from Mark Twain -- that reports of the death of the telephone in society as a whole are greatly exaggerated!)

Our corporate wiki will no doubt spur lots of new (and deeper?) discussions about a whole range of topics. Do those count as conversations in the traditional sense -- or do we need a new word for them?