The other day, I was waiting for the subway, standing next to a woman in her pajamas making breakfast. She wasn’t actually next to me but on the screen of another rider’s iPhone. The flashes of movement on the screen and their loud conversation caught my attention. I wasn’t trying to be nosy, but I (and several other commuters around me) was suddenly involved in what would have been a private, intimate moment.
I’m not the only one getting annoyed. Social media posts abound with people districted and flustered by the prevalence of public video calls. “Am I insane for thinking it’s extremely rude to FaceTime without headphones in a public space?” one Threads poster asked last year. “I find this to be so inconsiderate, entitled and obnoxious, honestly. I will never understand.” The more than 350 comments that followed revealed a divide about whether we should be turning the whole world into our living room. Some questioned how FaceTiming was any different from chatting with a friend in person. Others deemed public FaceTimers “arrogant individuals with no care for others.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon. FaceTime debuted with the iPhone 4 in 2010, but it took a few more years for enough people to get iPhones and grow accustomed to — and eventually feel entitled to — constant connection. The feature became available not just through WiFi but also via cellular data in 2012. People began to complain to etiquette experts, who gave their takes on the nuisance in newspaper columns. Video calls became even more normalized in 2020, when many of us started working remotely and stacking our calendars with Zoom meetings from 9-to-5, followed by virtual happy hours. Now, many have taken our comfort with chatting on camera into the real world. Our smartphones have blurred the space between what we do at home and what we do in public, and the digital world now has a tangible place in the public sphere.
Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center, says FaceTiming and talking on speakerphone in public are symptoms of broader shifts in social norms over the past two decades. It’s common to check your phone at the dinner table or seclude yourself from public interactions with headphones. When people start a video call with someone, even in a crowded area, “our brains create that sense of social presence, which takes us someplace else,” she says. We’re taken out of the environment and are less likely to be aware of the annoyed people around us. Despite the ire, people continue to take these video calls because the benefits, like reading social cues from the person they’re calling, “are greater than the violation of privacy that they apparently are not feeling,” she says.
For the people on the call, FaceTiming may be screen time that sits apart from “bad” screen time. Video calls make it easier to read social cues, which can help us avoid communication breakdowns that can happen over texts. One case study conducted during the pandemic lockdowns found that FaceTiming with family improved an Alzheimer’s patient’s behavior; he was less anxious and agitated after the calls and ate better than in the earliest days of lockdown. Even parents who keep young kids away from screens may give in for a video call with grandma and grandpa. A study from 2016 found that children under the age of 2 can learn words and patterns from interactive screen time like FaceTime calls, and even start to recognize people they repeatedly speak to, like a grandparent. But they don’t absorb as much from prerecorded videos.
FaceTime calls feel like hanging out, while phone calls can feel like work.
But for all the benefits of FaceTime, any tech we use to communicate “can also detract from in-person interaction experiences,” Juliana Schroeder, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, tells me in an email. Loud public calls can negatively affect the in-person interactions of other people around them — be it their fellow commuters, restaurant diners, or the people working out next to them at the gym.
Gen Z hates phone calls, but they grew up on video calls. FaceTime calls feel like hanging out, while phone calls can feel like work. Boomers, meanwhile, didn’t grow up talking on the phone in public, but they’re likely to rush to answer (remembering the pre-voicemail days), and may happily pick up video calls from family, even in crowded spaces without headphones at the ready. Smartphones have increased the pressure for us to be always available, and we’ve become more comfortable disrupting public spaces or texting during meetings and conversations to meet that demand.
Of course, we don’t know the reasons behind any individual FaceTime or speakerphone call, and so may be quick to judge. Caroline Lidz, a 23-year-old in Boston working in tech public relations, admits she’s operated with a double standard. She’s irritated when she encounters a person on a video call in public with no headphones, but she’ll answer any time her twin sister calls, which is usually on FaceTime (though she says she does use headphones). Lidz realized in speaking to me for this story that she tended to think, “It’s OK if I do it, because I know my reasons,” she says. But when she doesn’t know someone else’s reasons, “I’m less forgiving with other people.” The FaceTime calls are more engaging — she can’t be distractedly scrolling through her phone or on her laptop, but Lidz also says she thinks a lot about what the frenzy of public FaceTime calls means for privacy. Generally, Lidz says, to avoid being rude, people should do their best to respect the privacy of the person who’s calling you, so they know they may be broadcast to the public, and try not to show too much of the people around you on the call.
Part of the public-call shaming likely arises from the fear that we’re too connected and even addicted to our phones. The average American spends almost seven hours a day staring at screens. Three in four US adults who use FaceTime make calls at least once a week, with 14% of people using it multiple times a day, a 2023 survey from the University of Southern California’s Neely Center Social Media Index found. A lot of that screen time happens in public spaces, and it’s changing our social etiquette; the more people film TikToks or FaceTime in public, the more we let down our guard and accept the behavior as normal.
I’m guilty of FaceTiming my best friend in public when I need her advice on an outfit or gift I’m looking to buy. I try to be quick, feeling justified that I need to be on a video call because I’ve got something I need to show her. I answered a FaceTime call on a train once and screeched as quietly as possible — a friend had just gotten engaged, and I jumped on the call expecting to see the ring held up to the camera. My grandpa always puts his iPhone on speaker (he says it’s hard to hear through the phone’s tiny ear speaker) and will take these calls anywhere. We’ve all learned that if we call him, we could be on the line with anyone in the living room.
It’s as easy to justify these loud calls as it is to condemn them. We’ve gotten used to connecting to one another anytime and anywhere, leaving unpleasant places like airport terminals in favor of chatting with friends. That’s not necessarily bad. But please, for all of our sanity, put some headphones in.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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