Don't want to talk about it? Order a missed call

   When Alexis Gorman, 26, wanted to tell a man she had been dating that the courtship was over, she felt sending a Dear John text message was too impersonal. But she worried that if she called the man, she would face an awkward conversation or a confrontation.
   So she found a middle ground. She broke it off in a voice mail message, using new technology that allowed her to jump directly to the suitor’s voice mail, without ever having to talk to the man — or risk his actually answering the phone.
   The technology, called Slydial, lets callers dial a mobile phone but avoid an unwanted conversation — or unwanted intimacy — on the other end. The incoming call goes undetected by the recipient, who simply receives the traditional blinking light or ping that indicates that a voice mail message has been received.
   Gorman used a test version of Slydial that has been available for months. But since the finished product was unveiled to the public last week, more than 200,000 people have used the service, which is supported by advertisers like McDonald’s.
   The concept may sound antithetical to a digital era defined by ubiquitous communication and interactivity, but Slydial turns out to be only the latest in a breed of new technologies that fit squarely into an emerging paradox: tools that let users avoid direct communication.
   Technologies like e-mailing and blogging give the communicator the power to choose the time and manner of expression. Now, some academics, text messagers and creators of technologies say a trend has emerged: We are constantly just missing one another — on purpose.
   Indirect communication, experts suggest, may be turning some people into digitalera solipsists more interested in broadcasting information than in real time give-andtake.But Gorman, who works in marketing in Manhattan, said that using Slydial to break off her relationship allowed her to communicate effectively without the potential anxiety. “If it’s some jerk I went out on a couple of dates with, I can do without that drama,’’ she said.
   “Text messaging someone ‘I would prefer not to see you again’ is really not my style,’’ she added. “But at the same time, I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation.’’
   Furthering the popularity of one-way communication are web sites like Facebook, which have become home to personal news feeds in which users receive updates from friends, acquaintances and colleagues.
   Or there is Twitter, a messenging service that lets people send updates of 140 characters about what they are doing or thinking to the mobile phones of people who sign up to receive the constant stream.
   The culture of the veritable Personal News Crawl also includes radar.net, a web site that permits users to send photos or video bursts taken with a mobile phone to friends — and notify them of the updates with text messages. John Poisson, the founder and chief executive of Tiny Pictures, the company behind radar.net, said the service was designed to cater to small groups of close friends, not a broad audience, partly because he said the model of widely broadcasting personal updates was starting to annoy people.
   “We’re in this mode where we’re telling everybody everything all the time,’’ Poisson said, adding. “It becomes about saying things — just blathering on. We’re at the apex of that trend.’’
   Slydial may turn out to be just a fad.The company behind Slydial is not denying its duplicitous implications. The company’s web site, Mobile-Sphere, suggests several appropriate uses of Slydial, including leaving a message for a girlfriend who is a “talker” to avoid a long conversation, and for a wife when her husband does not want to talk about how much he lost at the tables in Las Vegas during a business trip.
   An array of recent innovations by other companies has encouraged the use of technology to deceive. One development, for instance, allows the employee who is running late to add background noises resembling heavy traffic to a mobile phone call. Another service places an automated call at a predetermined time so that the recipient can be extricated from a situation (a work meeting, or bad date) under the auspices of taking the “urgent” call.
   MobileSphere’s co-founder, Gavin Macomber, said the tool was a time-saver in a world in which conversations could waste time, whereas voice mail can get directly to the point. Part of the reason people are so overwhelmed, Macomber said, is because they are connected to devices and streams of data around the clock.“We’re slaves to our devices — BlackBerries and phones, reachable 24/7,” he said. Macomber declined to say precisely how the technology bypassed the traditional calling system, noting that the concept was covered by a pending patent. NYT NEWS
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