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It’s a Cell Phone – Not a Megaphone!

Why, oh why, do people talk so LOUDLY on their cell phones? Everyone notices it, many complain about it… and yet everyone does it.

So, why? What is that phenomenon all about?

A friend of mine, who happens to be in the field of telecommunications, recently enlightened me on this matter. As it turns out, cell phones are missing a bit of technology that our land-line phones have – the mechanism that helps us hear ourselves talking.

In regular telephones, we have something called a network card. One of its functions is to re-route a bit of your speech from the mouthpiece back to the earpiece. The speaker hears themselves talking, which helps them regulate their speaking volume. This is called sidetone.

For some reason, cell phones don’t have sidetone, so we don’t hear ourselves through the earpiece. It doesn’t seem like that should matter much, but it does.

Because our first experiences were with land-line phones, we subconsciously learned to listen for our own voice through the earpiece. When we don’t hear it on cell phones, we instinctively TALK LOUDER.

Maybe this bit of information will help soothe your nerves when a fellow shopper is telling the entire store about her colonoscopy. Or, maybe not.

However, now that you know that we all tend to do this, make sure YOU don’t broadcast your personal life by accident. I promise you, the rest of us really don’t want to know.

Posted by Margaret in Everyday Etiquette and tagged cell phone etiquette, privacy.