Back in the old times, mobile phones allowed us to select only one of the preset ringtones. One for all the callers. Later on, we could upload our own audio file, flooding our space with our personal preferences. Loud, louder, a new toy.

The smarter the phones got, the more sophisticated their ringtones and notification sounds became. More apps wanted to let us know they had a piece of information we had to react to. Now. And we did, we reacted. The more we reacted, the more urgent everything became and we continued to react faster, more, racing ourselves to meet our urgent deadlines.

Then, silence. Silence was the answer to urgency. We muted our ringtones and we reacted even faster. Do we still need them now, when our smartphones became extensions of our hands?