This article certainly has interesting implications for those of us hyperventilating about next-generation voice technologies. Being in the VoIP engineering consulting business (and a fixed-line centric one, at that), it does highlight an interesting point I usually ignore due to self-selecting bias; I like talking on the phone, and tend to talk to a lot of other people who do also. It's important for people like me to be reminded that overall, voice minutes are declining as a proportion of electr(ic/onic) communication.<p>Also, text is a big deal. In the fixed-line VoIP world, we tend to dismissively poo-poo SMS as a pre-IP anachronism that maintains its captive user base at the whim of carriers who design handset interfaces that afford vast UX preference to SMS over other means of delivering text messages, e.g. the various iPhone "free text messaging replacement" apps that have popped up that run over IP rather than the SMS portion of the mobile transport core. I usually think its days are numbered, and think 160 characters is laughably impractical in a world of mushrooming smartphone adoption. But the kinds of sociological observations raised in this article make me wonder if that's really true.