Of course given the Fallen State of Man, Corporate Cultural Tyranny and Porn exist and account for nearly all of the remaining use of this technology.

The area I live in has more or less unlimited free WiFi so that they can walk around all doing their jobs and voice chatting even when they’re not video calling.

Another anthropological observation: In Mainland China ‘push to talk’ type chat is very popular. People go about their business holding back and forth voice conversations in WeChat. In other words they send a recorded message in that particular chat window and other person(s) respond similarly. Point being that you’re busy you don’t need to listen to a message snippet immediately. This probably took off initially due to Chinese Text Input being a bit more difficult than (say) English, but these days is possible to blast out written Chinese very quickly if one makes the effort to learn the more efficient input methods or even just uses text-to-speech.

Still, this back and forth with recorded voice snippets seems baked into the Mainland Chinese tech genome now and here to stay for a while.

So, I guess habits differ. For sure Westerners are much more privacy-oriented and individualistic than East Asians… and South-East Asians practically wither and die if ‘alone’ for any length of time.

Funny Old World.

MBTI is more theoretically Jungian, and DKTS (although based on the MBTI) is more heuristic.
Wikipedia is pretty good with both of them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator

There are 16 major variants (4 factors each with 2 opposite poles), and oodles of grey areas, so sometimes typing approaches astrology, but people who are solidly in one of the cells are really unmistakable for any other major type.

Now, apart from teleconferencing – which is an imposition I’d better be getting paid to participate in – and talking to one’s nephews/nieces or later in life grandchildren, what’s the use case for video calling (apart from, of course, Porn)?

Video is just too much of an intrusion into our private lives. When we go out to meet people face-to-face, we instinctively ‘put on our faces’ and gird up for it. At home and the Kubrickian Videophone beeps, it’s a mild existential terror.

What’s happening now with voice calls vs. text is at least partly an evolution of this — at least for us introverts.

Who knows what the eventual steady state condition will become? At least until The Machine Stops.

One summer when I was home from college, the phone rang at around 2 or 3 in the morning. Being an old-style Ma Bell rotary, it sat in the built-in niche in the hall outside my parents bedroom. My somewhat irate father summoned me to the instrument, and stood forebodingly nearby as I exchanged somewhat noncommittal pleasantries with an obviously inebriated female caller.
After I hung up, he asked roughly, “Who … was that?” (my Dad did not swear in our presence, but I could fill it in from his tone).
I replied gently, “Your sister.”
He turned and went back into his room without further remark.

(She was a dear and devoted auntie, but at that time a bit of a lush. She and her second husband dried out together later in life.)

Paradoxically, perhaps, we have all been active in theater and scouting, where the interactions are defined and to some extent finite, so we have decided to call ourselves “performing introverts.”

As for the phone polling:
We only answer if the caller ID is known, or if an unknown number is expected (I’ve been surprised sometimes that a call I was waiting for came from a non-local area code, but people no longer change their mobile numbers when they move).
Fortunately, the landline mailbox sends an email to both of us with voice transcription if someone does leave a message (we get some very strange ones from time to time, which I sometimes forward to the caller with some gentle hints about elocution).
Robocalls on cell phones are a pain; they used to be illegal because the receiver was the one paying for the minutes, but now everyone is on unlimited plans.
I used to block numbers, but the memory allotted for that function on my landline phone ran out, so now I don’t bother. Sometimes I save them under “scam” but mostly I just ignore them.
Scammers who prey on elderly people with “great deals if you sign up now” or “the IRS is going to put you in jail if you don’t call back” and so forth are prime targets for a new circle in Dante’s Inferno. They can all sit around calling each other for eternity.

I have grown to like texting for quick messages that don’t really need discussion, because people (including me) aren’t interrupted with those as much as with voice calls.

The other was when my mother was suffering from health problems. I began to dread the sound of the phone ringing, especially early in the morning or late at night. Too often it meant a health issue that needed my attention.

Now it is the robocalls. No rest for the wicked.