When Alexander Graham Bell first invented the phone, he suggested people begin conversations with the slightly nautical greeting of "Ahoy-hoy!" Instead, somewhere in the first decades of the 20th century, we settled on "Hello", and it stuck – until the past 10 years or so, when the culture of the telephone call died a sudden and abrupt death.

This occurred to me recently when I went through a major life event: the birth of my first child. Instead of calling family and friends with the big news, I emailed them. Immediate family got a FaceTime call, which I'd argue is different from an old-fashioned phone call for a few reasons: you know who is calling; its occurrence is usually decided by both parties in advance; and you can see one another, or at least the gist of a face, depending on how imperfectly or intermittently the internet gods choose to render the connection.

The telephone call, by contrast, was full of unknowns, which is perhaps why Millennials like me – notorious control freaks who insist on the perfect filter for an Instagram photo of our avocado toast – find the prospect of one so terrifying. The expectation used to be that when the phone rang, you picked it up. Until the mid-'90s, caller ID was not common on landlines, so you had no idea who was on the other end. But to not pick up the phone was a breach of the social contract: irresponsible, fringe weird, like not returning a pleasantry to a stranger while walking the dog.

You picked it up, and then you had another responsibility: to seek out the person for whom the call was being made. This could be done in a polite way – by physically roaming the house until the relevant party was found and discreetly informed – or by yelling the name of one's brother very loudly, and repeatedly, until he took his headphones off and descended from his bedroom to pick up the receiver.

These days, I, and many of my peers, simply won't pick up a phone call on the mobile if we don't recognise the number. Our defence for this antisocial behaviour is admittedly weak. There are too many other pings and alerts emanating from the same device to privilege the phone call, which usually comes out of the blue and demands the recipient's full attention. When a friend calls me these days, I answer with an alarmed, "What's happened?" We keep in touch via group texts, which are endlessly accommodating of different time zones, schedules and moods.