David Weinberger writes on Many-to-Many: New rule: Don’t call me if you don’t know me:
“I like Skype. It lets me make phone calls for free to the other 4M people who have signed up for the service. The calls go through my computer and they work real good. But I’ve just gotten my second random phone call from some well-intentioned stranger who wants to know if I want to chat. Actually, I don’t…”

[I have also posted the following commentary on Many2Many]
These phenomena are not new of course… when VoxChat first appeared in ‘96 or ‘97, PART of the buzz and excitement (in addition to low-cost long-distance calling) was genuinely about random contacts. Now, it’s less of a novelty, and more of an annoyance, as David Weinberger rightly notes. So, a few observations:

a) long-distance calling nowadays is so cheap (I routinely phone Alasksa from England for ~5cents/minute, inevitably with Voice Over IP ‘hidden in the plumbing’ somewhere along the line!), that the relative BENEFIT of ‘desktop/laptop/headset phone calls’, when you factor in other contextual issues, is less spectacular than it was originally

b) for newcomers to vanilla Voice Over IP from a desktop/laptop/PDA, there is still an excitement factor akin to the ‘DX-ing’ experience of Ham Radio. DX-ing is PRECISELY about contacting random people far away (!!!), for a bit of tech talk and random talk, purely to ‘add it to the log book’.

c) The ham radio community is small and focussed compared with modern Internet users– ham operators share at least the context of ‘DX-ing intentions’ (so, for example, TELEPHONING a random ham radio operator in Timbuktu would completely miss the point!)

d) Skype and similar tools fall in an awkward gap… part ham-radio-DX-appeal, part mundane-so-what-it-sounds-like-another-long-distance-call (to paraphrase a great Muddy Waters song). The way to bridge the gap is EITHER to apply the setting, as someone else has posted, to disable calls from people not on your buddy list, OR to hang up quickly on the random caller.

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