Does telephony matter if no one talks to each other anymore?

This is a problem that has bothered me for a while. You hear complaints that “millennials” don’t know how to talk on the phone. Messengers seem to have all the growth these days. It appears having a live conversation with someone in another location, a real time communication (RTC), has completely lost out to asynchronous forms of communication.

I have spent most of my career working to make RTC better — was that a waste? Should I be working on something else? Is there any chance for growth after peak telephony, the point at which RTC has peaked, or should we just give up?

See the Medium post below for my quest to quantitatively figure this out.