You stay up long enough watching TV and you’re eventually going to find yourself sucked into tuning to one of those over-the-top and often poorly done telethons. You get the chance to see amateur acting at its absolute worst and who knows, with enough luck you may even find yourself staring at a quality product you may have never known that you wanted until that specific time. Those were always integral elements of the telethon but the thing that always stuck with me was that hotline number that was getting mercilessly drilled into my head. By the end of one 15-minute segment, I found myself having memorized another number and it annoyed me that their tactics actually worked. Of course, the days of bombarding people with hotlines are really starting to settle into the rear view mirror. You’d really be hard-pressed to come across a company whose sole means of contact is through the phone these days, and you could even make an argument for texting being the better way to go in terms of trying to contact a particular company.

Let’s lay the pros and cons of texting right out on the table. For the cons, it’s perceived to be an informal way of communicating. People also see it as an impersonal way to communicate and a somehow subtle indicator that you don’t really want to spend that much time talking to someone. As for the pros, well texting is remarkably convenient, allowing you to send out a message from just about anywhere regardless of the room you’re in provided that you have the reception. People who like to place phone calls know just how difficult it is to stake out a quiet place just so they can hear the person on the other end of the line. Texting is also more prevalent these days, so getting someone to text you is less of an imposition on them than it would be to actually ask them to call you.

The way that texting has surpassed calling as the more preferred mode of communication becomes easier to explain once you start to consider just how superior it really is from a convenience standpoint. Those cons mentioned earlier really are more inventions of imagination than they are reality so they don’t really hold much weight if you judge calling alongside texting. Maybe this does mean that the days of hotlines on telethons are gone, but taking its place may very well be longer text lines that will start to get drilled into your head.