I don’t know how old you are, but phone calls were really expensive in the decades before 2000. It’s not something low income people could afford to do very often.
I expect this depends a lot on where you were living in the decades before 2000 and what you mean by "phone calls".
In much of the US, in the 70's, 80's, and 90's a telephone had a fixed monthly fee and 'free' calling to any other phone in the local area. Phone penetration was over 90%[1] in 1970 and rose to over 95% by 1980 suggesting that even those at 50% below the poverty line in 1980 (roughly 6% of the US population) had access to a telephone.
So for many living in the US they have probably experienced being able to talk with all of their friends for "free" as long as they want, and if they were old enough arguing with siblings about who got to use the phone longest.
Further, in the "current" epoch, the article suggested that WhatsApp was profitable at 99 cents per year when it was acquired. I would not be surprised if that it is still the case that such a messaging service does not require advertising revenue to be cash flow positive. It just needs enough subscribers.
I grew up in LA in the 80s. Yes, "local" calls were free and that probably covered most of the people you went to school with. If you had friends or family members 20+ miles away (commonplace for car-centric LA) it was pretty easy to rack up huge bills.
My first boyfriend was born in the late 70s (UK) and hos family didn’t own a phone — not one landline phone between them — because phones were too expensive.
I was early 80s, and watched landline and mobile costs fall to negligible levels.
My current girlfriend was born in the late 80s (USA, but world traveler with family work), and I think from the start of highschool onward pretty much always assumed there was an internet connection and too-cheap-to-care calls even before everyone made their own VOIP/video chat messengers.
I understand, although we can argue about 'Most of us' versus 'Some of us'. My experience was that my need for out of area calls went up only after I moved from where I went to high school to where I went to college. And many of my friends stayed local. There was a great piece in the NY Times about 3 years ago that talked about how the typical American lives within 18 miles of their family.(found it https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...)
Something that came with the Internet, and didn't exist for me prior to its existence, was a large body of friends who were not local to me. Today, if I had to go back to metered long distance rather than what we have today it would absolutely be cost prohibitive! And clearly some people move around more than others and for them they might have a lot of friends and family outside of their local calling region back then as well.
The bottom line is that I can see the point you were making but I think we disagree on the magnitude of its impact on the general population that was living with phones at that time.
If it was too expensive to dial out or accept collect, life went on for people rich and poor. I think we’ve entered a world where opting out of constant communication (like not answering your phone) is completely alien and in some cases unacceptable, which in turn makes the prospect of constant communication valuable. But I’m not sure how many use cases are out there for how constant digital connection improves outcomes for acute life events or quality of life in general, but the assumption is that it does (despite growing research to the contrary).
> I think we’ve entered a world where opting out of constant communication (like not answering your phone) is completely alien and in some cases unacceptable
I left my smartphone and my smartwatch in my smart home when I went to work today (guess I'm not that smart).
I hear through the grapevine that my wife is losing her coolant because she can't text me every ten minutes, or locate me with Find My Friends.
We had multiple independent local phone companies one place I lived. I could call into the next state for free (and by dialing just five numbers), but my friends two miles away in the same state were 35¢ a minute.
Phone calls were expensive because telcos were (still are) a monopoly. Phone calls got cheaper only because they eventually got competition from VOIP-like solutions.
