The Death of the Telephone Call .1876–2007.

Slate reports:

When Slate was founded in 1996, people all over the world spent much of their day speaking into telephones. In 2016, as Slate celebrates its 20th birthday, the phone call is a thing of the past.


Not entirely of the past, of course; phone conversation lives on in roughly the same way that swing dancing lives on, or Latin declension, or manual transmission. You can still find it, but you have to look a lot harder, because it’s no longer a way of life.

The phone call died, according to Nielsen, in the autumn of 2007. During the final three months of that year the average monthly number of texts sent on mobile phones (218) exceeded, for the first time in recorded history, the average monthly number of phone calls (213). A frontier had been crossed. The primary purpose of most people’s primary telephones was no longer to engage in audible speech.

An article, well worth your time.