Text

Slowly, my friends have gotten me to text.  It used to cost me 20c per text, which I let them know, so they all knew to call me instead.

That's the point.  If you want to communicate with another human being, especially a friend, speak to them.

I changed my phone service plan and got unlimited texts, and a Samsung phone, which I have parked on the shelf for the last six months because my dumb phone with its actual keyboard still works just fine and now I can receive and answer texts for free.  Well, it turns out it that texting is not as blessed as it seems to be to many people.

My Samsung might be the model which would burn my house down if I ever charged it which I haven't--did I say my dumb phone worked just fine?--and my new phone plan launched my new and better life, and I have been engaging in texts lately.  But it's not actual communication, rather, it's throwing snippets of information out there, sort of like hollering, such as "here" [I've arrived, where are you] or "2 min" [I am two minutes away by car and I am texting while driving and if I don't crash first I'll be there very shortly].

In a phone call, which used to be the norm, there's real communication because you can nail down all the details.  In answering a text, the recipient of your message, if you have included a query or queries in it, can ignore you or give you a partial answer to some but not all of your written content, and you're kept either waiting for that other person's response or hanging onto the partial, perhaps purposefully selective response until the event has come or has passed.

If it had been a phone call, either the connection wouldn't have been made in which case there are no plans laid so nobody is left hanging awaiting the other person's full response, or the call would have been completed and the information exchange would have been complete, including the nuances.  Except for very limited instances, like waking up at 3 am because of a storm outside and texting that you're not going to be at the agreed-to meeting place at 7 am for a run (because you can't call somebody in the middle of the night for that relatively unimportant information exchange and now you don't have to arise at 6:30 am to phone to say I won't be there), the exchange of full information is better done through actual talking.