DealBook: Oracle to Leave Nasdaq for the Big Board

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DealBook: Oracle to Leave Nasdaq for the Big Board

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Disruptions: Even the Tech Elites Leave Gadgets Behind

Nick Bilton/The New York Times The writer’s dinner guests place their smartphones in a stack in the middle of the table.

If you were to meet 32-year-old Robin Sloan of San Francisco, you might think him a Luddite unable to get his head around new technologies. He owns an old Nokia phone with one main application: making phone calls. He takes notes using a pen and paper notepad. And he reads books printed on paper.

But Mr. Sloan is far from a Luddite. He used to work at Twitter as a media manager, teaching news outlets to use the hottest social media tools. Before that he was with Current TV as an online strategist, inventing the future of digital journalism.

Yet last year, as he set out to write his first book, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” he found his iPhone and other technologies were getting in the way of his productivity, so he simply got rid of them. “I found it was more important and more productive for me to be daydreaming and jotting down notes,” he said. “I needed my idle minutes to contribute to the story I was doing, not checking my e-mail, or checking tweets.”

Even in Silicon Valley, Mr. Sloan has company.

As every aspect of our daily lives has become hyperconnected, some people on the cutting edge of tech are trying their best to push it back a few feet. Keeping their phone in their pocket. Turning off their home Wi-Fi at night or on weekends. And reading books on paper, rather than pixels.

I’ve experienced this, too.

Two years ago, when the iPhone and iPad were spiking in popularity, when I dined with other technology bloggers and reporters we enthusiastically passed our phones around the table, showing off the latest app or funny YouTube clip.

Now, even as our gadgets can hold more apps and stream faster videos, when I’m at dinner with technologists we play a new game. Attendees happily place their smartphones in a stack in the middle of the table, and the first person who touches his or her phone before the meal is over has to pay the bill.

Some couples who work in tech seem to be trying to step back the most.

“At least once a month my wife and I jump in our car and drive until cell service drops off (yes, this is possible) and spend the weekend engaged with all things analog,” Evan Sharp, a founder of Pinterest, said — on e-mail. “We read, we walk all over the California hills, we cook, we meet people who don’t work in technology.”

Other couples have told me of a “no gadgets in the bedroom” rule. (Kindles are sometimes an exception.) Some say they leave their phones at home when they go for Sunday brunch. Rather than take a picture of their bacon and eggs to post to Instagram, they can now enjoy each other’s company, and do that strange thing called talking.

There could even be a business model in products that encourage us to step away from our gadgets.

Last Tuesday, Penguin Press published “The Pocket Scavenger,” a book both physical and digital that encourages readers to go on an unusual scavenger hunt, collecting random objects, drawing and smudging on the book’s pages, then documenting them later with a smartphone.

“We’re not going to get rid of technology,” said Keri Smith, the author. “I feel like we’ve lost touch with noticing smells and tactile sensations, and I’d just like to offer some kind of antidote to what’s out there.”

As for Mr. Sloan, who has since published his book, he said his break from technology was a resounding success. He still checks his e-mail, but not while he’s getting coffee with someone or going for a stroll.

Although he isn’t rushing off to buy the next iPhone, he said he wouldn’t rule it out. But he would use such a device differently than he did before downgrading his cellphone.

“It sounds silly because we all used to do this all the time, but after getting rid of my smartphone I am now so much more comfortable just leaving the house without any phone at all,” he said. “I feel like I kind of learned how to do that again, and I would do the same thing if I had a fancy new smartphone too.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Boom Times in Paraguay Leave Many Behind

But just a few minutes away by car one recent morning, grandmothers waded through raw sewage in the labyrinthine slum of La Chacarita, scavenging copper wire and aluminum cans to sell at scrap yards.

“Tell me about this growth,” said Cecilia Aguirre, 60, grasping a plastic bag holding her day’s takings, worth about $4. Squinting under the hot sun, she said she worked every day to feed the four grandchildren who live in her home. Asked about Paraguay’s robust economy, she added, “I’ve heard of no such thing in my lifetime.”

Indeed, Paraguay’s economic boom, fueled by bountiful harvests of export commodities like soybeans and corn, exists only in pockets. In parts of Asunción, showrooms are selling out of Porsches and Audis, and cranes are putting the finishing touches on luxury towers like the Ícono, a 37-story skyscraper of SoHo-inspired lofts.

Yet much of the country, which has long figured among South America’s poorest and most unequal nations, remains left behind. More than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the central bank, and Paraguay ranks near the bottom among South American countries in reducing poverty over the last decade, according to the United Nations.

Social spending for antipoverty projects is minimal, largely because taxation is lacking. Paraguay did not even have an income tax until this year, but even though the new across-the-board rate is low, at 10 percent, few people are expected to pay it, as exemptions and loopholes abound. The result: the economic boom may be accentuating the festering inequality in one of Latin America’s most politically unstable nations.

“Nearly all of the growth is driven by highly mechanized agriculture, which generates few jobs for the population,” said Andrew Dickson, an expert on Paraguay’s development policies at the University of Birmingham in Britain. “With a government that finances itself largely through value-added taxes and taxes on imports, you have a situation rather like a low-income African country.”

Paraguay is a landlocked nation about the size of California, sandwiched between southern Brazil and northern Argentina, with a population of 6.5 million. About 77 percent of its arable land is controlled by 1 percent of the nation’s landowners, according to the last agricultural census, and land disputes simmer in various parts of the country.

Activists claim that for decades large tracts of land were illegally distributed by corrupt officials, leaving many land titles in question. In one particularly bloody clash last June, 11 peasants and six police officers were killed at a soy estate in Curuguaty, in eastern Paraguay.

Legislators seized on that episode as a way to oust Fernando Lugo, the former Roman Catholic bishop who was elected president in 2008, ending six decades of one-party rule. Mr. Lugo had initially been expected to focus on reducing inequality, but faced obstacles in doing so.

Paraguay’s new president is one of the nation’s wealthiest men, the tobacco magnate Horacio Cartes, who was elected Sunday after promoting conservative, business-friendly policies during his campaign. He recognized poverty as an issue but has been vague about any plans for reducing it beyond trying to create more jobs through private investment.

The government’s economists remain bullish about growth, arguing that Paraguay, devastated by a 19th-century war that wiped out most of its male population and ruled throughout much of the 20th century by Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, is emerging from decades of ostracism in the global economy.

Paraguay sold $500 million of bonds in January in international markets, a rare source of financing for a nation overlooked by many foreign bankers for decades. Inflation and unemployment remain low, at less than 2 percent and less than 6 percent, respectively, and the overall poverty rate has fallen to about 32 percent in 2011 from 44 percent in 2003, said Roland Horst, a board member at the central bank.

“We do have a peasant issue now and then,” Mr. Horst said in an interview. “But there is less tension than 10 years ago.” He said the government had been trying to reduce poverty, noting that a program of giving small cash stipends to people in extreme poverty, begun in 2005, now included more than 75,000 families. Other economists, however, dispute such sunny assessments, arguing that the economy remains subject to wide swings, surging this year thanks in part to favorable weather conditions for certain crops, after contracting slightly in 2012 when farmers struggled with a drought.

They also contend that Paraguay’s social welfare programs remain meager compared with antipoverty projects in neighboring countries, which have lifted tens of millions of people out of abject living conditions. They blame Paraguay’s relatively weak state, with tax collection corresponding to only about 18 percent of gross domestic product, a figure lower than that of African nations like Congo and Chad.

“The statistics showing historically low unemployment are a farce,” said Luis Rojas Villagra, an economist at the National University, who estimates that as much as half of Paraguay’s work force is unemployed or underemployed in jobs with degrading wages and working conditions.

“How is it possible to reconcile the fact that hundreds of people survive each day by sifting through garbage in the municipal dump of Asunción while Paraguayans are also the biggest per-capita spenders in Punta del Este?” said Mr. Rojas Villagra, referring to the Uruguayan resort city where rich Paraguayans vacation alongside moneyed Argentines and Brazilians.

Such contrasts persist across Paraguay’s economy. Pockets of luxury, for instance, are expanding near Ciudad del Este, the city on the Brazilian border renowned as a smuggler’s haven.

One development, the Paraná Country Club, includes mansions selling for more than $3 million, largely to soybean growers or business executives from Brazil who have opened factories in Paraguay, a migration of manufacturing that is starting to resemble that of companies from the United States opening factories in low-wage Mexican border cities.

“2013 is starting to look like an amazing year,” said Thelma Amaral, an architect who designs homes near Ciudad del Este.

But elsewhere, including the soybean regions at the root of the growth, examples abound of disparities and disputes, largely over land. A small leftist rebel group, the Paraguayan People’s Army, has been picking off security forces in remote areas. Last weekend, the group killed at least one police officer and wounded several others.

In December, gunmen shot dead Vidal Vega, a leader of the peasant movement involved in the deadly clash at Curuguaty. He had been expected to be a witness at the criminal trial intended to shed light on the massacre. The inquiry into his killing, as in similar cases of peasant leaders killed in Paraguay in recent years, has turned up few leads.

News Analysis: Computers Trade Quickly, but Leave No Time to Think

Most of the time.

Unfortunately, the improved markets also are more prone to disaster. The same computerization and increased competition that provided the benefits also weeded out people who had the obligation to step up in times of stress, and virtually eliminated the ability of people and institutions to slow or halt markets when something goes badly wrong.

And with technological innovation continuing apace, the risks may have increased. Regulators can require changes that will prevent an exact repeat of any given disaster, as they did after the flash crash of May 6, 2010, but there appears to be no way to guess what will be the immediate cause of the next problem. And that problem may be huge. On Wednesday, computers at Knight Capital Group, a firm that executes millions of stock trades every day, went haywire.

Unintended orders spewed forth and some stocks gyrated wildly. It took the firm the better part of an hour to turn off its computers, and on Thursday it estimated its losses at $440 million.

Knight, one of the biggest players in the stock market, said it was exploring strategic alternatives. That is a polite way of saying it is desperately searching for a buyer.

It may be worthwhile to consider what would have happened a few decades ago had a computer somehow done the same thing.

The orders would have flooded into specialists at the New York Stock Exchange — people who had a duty to make markets — or to the market makers in Nasdaq stocks who had a similar responsibility. Some of the stupid orders might have been executed, but trading in the affected stocks would have come to a halt within minutes while people tried to figure out what was going on. There would have been red faces at the firm responsible, but much less red ink.

Those market makers are largely gone now. Their sources of profit — the spreads between what they sold stocks for and what they would pay for them — have vanished with competition and rule changes that allow share prices to move by one cent or less, rather than the one-eighth of a dollar, or 12.5 cents, that used to be the minimum change.

Market makers have been largely replaced by high-frequency traders who use computers that can react to orders in nanoseconds. They send in orders — and cancel them — far faster than any human could hope to do.

Exchanges, knowing that they need market makers who will take the other side of customer orders, offer rebates to high-frequency traders who manage to fill a lot of orders. In normal times, the result is markets that are highly liquid and very fast.

Decades ago, the size of an order that could be executed was limited by the capital available to the stock exchange specialist, and it was necessary for Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers to fill the role for large institutional orders. There are enough high-frequency firms that big orders can now be filled quickly and at lower costs.

However, those high-frequency traders have no obligation to hang around and continue to make markets when things get dicey. There was plenty of criticism of the specialists and market makers in the old days. We are approaching the 25th anniversary of the 1987 crash, when many Nasdaq market makers panicked and decided that the safer course was to not answer their phones.

But the market makers generally met their responsibilities. If they were unwilling to do so, perhaps because of a flood of orders to sell a particular stock, the market in that stock would simply shut down for a time. That pause would give others time to see what was happening, and anyone who thought the market move was unreasonable could step in and offer to buy the stock.

Now, many of the high-frequency traders — who have no power to halt trading, even if their computers somehow concluded that was wise — have simply programmed their computers to get out of a market if it is going crazy. The result is that markets may have far less liquidity when that liquidity is needed most.

To get the advantages that come with being listed as market makers, high-frequency firms were required to usually have offers posted to buy and sell the stocks in which they made markets. That rule led to the stub bid. If things were going crazy, the firm would put in a bid of $1 a share for a $40 stock. It met the requirement, but obviously no one would be stupid enough to sell at that price.

Unless that someone were a computer.

News Analysis: Computers Trade Quickly, but Leave No Time to Think

Most of the time.

Unfortunately, the improved markets also are more prone to disaster. The same computerization and increased competition that provided the benefits also weeded out people who had the obligation to step up in times of stress, and virtually eliminated the ability of people and institutions to slow or halt markets when something goes badly wrong.

And with technological innovation continuing apace, the risks may have increased. Regulators can require changes that will prevent an exact repeat of any given disaster, as they did after the flash crash of May 6, 2010, but there appears to be no way to guess what will be the immediate cause of the next problem. And that problem may be huge. On Wednesday, computers at Knight Capital Group, a firm that executes millions of stock trades every day, went haywire.

Unintended orders spewed forth and some stocks gyrated wildly. It took the firm the better part of an hour to turn off its computers, and on Thursday it estimated its losses at $440 million.

Knight, one of the biggest players in the stock market, said it was exploring strategic alternatives. That is a polite way of saying it is desperately searching for a buyer.

It may be worthwhile to consider what would have happened a few decades ago had a computer somehow done the same thing.

The orders would have flooded into specialists at the New York Stock Exchange — people who had a duty to make markets — or to the market makers in Nasdaq stocks who had a similar responsibility. Some of the stupid orders might have been executed, but trading in the affected stocks would have come to a halt within minutes while people tried to figure out what was going on. There would have been red faces at the firm responsible, but much less red ink.

Those market makers are largely gone now. Their sources of profit — the spreads between what they sold stocks for and what they would pay for them — have vanished with competition and rule changes that allow share prices to move by one cent or less, rather than the one-eighth of a dollar, or 12.5 cents, that used to be the minimum change.

Market makers have been largely replaced by high-frequency traders who use computers that can react to orders in nanoseconds. They send in orders — and cancel them — far faster than any human could hope to do.

Exchanges, knowing that they need market makers who will take the other side of customer orders, offer rebates to high-frequency traders who manage to fill a lot of orders. In normal times, the result is markets that are highly liquid and very fast.

Decades ago, the size of an order that could be executed was limited by the capital available to the stock exchange specialist, and it was necessary for Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers to fill the role for large institutional orders. There are enough high-frequency firms that big orders can now be filled quickly and at lower costs.

However, those high-frequency traders have no obligation to hang around and continue to make markets when things get dicey. There was plenty of criticism of the specialists and market makers in the old days. We are approaching the 25th anniversary of the 1987 crash, when many Nasdaq market makers panicked and decided that the safer course was to not answer their phones.

But the market makers generally met their responsibilities. If they were unwilling to do so, perhaps because of a flood of orders to sell a particular stock, the market in that stock would simply shut down for a time. That pause would give others time to see what was happening, and anyone who thought the market move was unreasonable could step in and offer to buy the stock.

Now, many of the high-frequency traders — who have no power to halt trading, even if their computers somehow concluded that was wise — have simply programmed their computers to get out of a market if it is going crazy. The result is that markets may have far less liquidity when that liquidity is needed most.

To get the advantages that come with being listed as market makers, high-frequency firms were required to usually have offers posted to buy and sell the stocks in which they made markets. That rule led to the stub bid. If things were going crazy, the firm would put in a bid of $1 a share for a $40 stock. It met the requirement, but obviously no one would be stupid enough to sell at that price.

Unless that someone were a computer.

For Executive Women, Is Maternity Leave Necessary?

“He looks like a little pumpkin,” her brother-in-law remarked. “You should dress him up as a pumpkin for Halloween.”

“I think we can come up with a more creative costume than that,” Mrs. Stern recalls replying. “But that reminds me. ...”

With that, she reached for her laptop and fired off an e-mail to an associate about a Halloween party being planned by her New York business, Divalysscious Moms.

One should note: this was in July.

“There wasn’t even a thought in my mind about taking a maternity leave,” said Mrs. Stern, whose oldest child was 3 at the time. “It was like, Oliver was going to be born, and he was, and life was going to be continuing in — I don’t want to say madness — but the way that I do business.”

Like many women, Mrs. Stern has followed the news that Marissa Mayer, the new chief of Yahoo, is pregnant with her first child, due in October. Ms. Mayer, 37, told Fortune that her maternity leave would be “a few weeks long, and I’ll work throughout it.”

With those nine words, she opened a new front in the debate over work-life balance and that nettlesome phrase “having it all.” The debate was already simmering in the wake of an article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who had been director of policy planning at the State Department but found, as she wrote, “that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

Ms. Mayer’s approach? “I like to stay in the rhythm of things,” she told Fortune.

The reactions — on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere — have varied widely. Some criticized Ms. Mayer as a poor role model for working women. Others congratulated her for embracing two challenges at once. Another camp marveled at her naïveté about what was in store.

But what about women who have already taken the path of an abbreviated leave? What do they make of the feverish parsing of Ms. Mayer’s postpartum plans? In interviews, many said that for women at the top of their profession or running their own show, the decision to not take a traditional leave can feel like an empowering choice — and at the same time, not a choice at all.

“You can think of a lot of moms who have more than one child, and do they ever say, ‘I’m going to stop feeding my older child because I have a newborn’?” asked Pooja Sankar, 31, chief executive of Piazza, an online forum for teachers and students to solve problems. Ms. Sankar, who gave birth to her first child three weeks ago, thinks of Piazza as one of her own, too: “I’m the C.E.O. of a company. This ‘child’ depends on me to run, to exist, really.”

Many women have no choice but to quickly return to work because they need the paycheck or can’t risk losing their job. And waitresses, nannies and teachers, for instance, can’t send e-mails from their iPhones and call it “working.”

New parents with the financial means have solutions that others don’t when they have to answer to both a newborn and a boss. Ms. Mayer, for example, will be able to hire as many nannies and baby nurses as she needs. Ms. Sankar’s parents and in-laws are living in her home in Palo Alto, Calif.

When Ivanka Trump flew to Miami on business eight days after giving birth to her daughter, Arabella, last summer, she rode in her father’s plane, returning late that night.

“The nature of the projects I was working on required me to have a hyper-abbreviated maternity leave,” said Ms. Trump, 30. “Yes, there are times when I look back and wish that had not been the case. But it’s life, and it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Still, the heavyweight questions that go beyond simple questions of money inevitably arise when a story like Ms. Mayer’s pops up. Is it progress for high-profile women to willingly forgo their right to a maternity leave? Or, by making maternity leave yet another victim of our always-on culture, does it send the message that taking true time off is only for the uncommitted?

These days, just as vacation is punctuated with work e-mails, maternity leave is not lived 100 percent disconnected, either. Some parents believe this half-on, half-off state is an unfair burden.

But some entrepreneurs like Maria Seidman, 34, of Manhattan say they don’t expect anything else. Two weeks ago, in the recovery room after the birth of her second child, she announced the event via (what else?) Yapp, the business she helped found. It helps people quickly publish mobile applications.

“Nobody had any expectations — not my team, my investors, or my family — that I would be in any way connected,” she said. “I wanted to do it. It was not an obligation. I was updating this app in real time, showing loved ones pictures of the baby. Was that work or life?”

Mrs. Seidman argued that maternity leave itself is “a false construct,” adding, “What does that mean in today’s fused world?”

For Executive Women, Is Maternity Leave Necessary?

“He looks like a little pumpkin,” her brother-in-law remarked. “You should dress him up as a pumpkin for Halloween.”

“I think we can come up with a more creative costume than that,” Mrs. Stern recalls replying. “But that reminds me. ...”

With that, she reached for her laptop and fired off an e-mail to an associate about a Halloween party being planned by her New York business, Divalysscious Moms.

One should note: this was in July.

“There wasn’t even a thought in my mind about taking a maternity leave,” said Mrs. Stern, whose oldest child was 3 at the time. “It was like, Oliver was going to be born, and he was, and life was going to be continuing in — I don’t want to say madness — but the way that I do business.”

Like many women, Mrs. Stern has followed the news that Marissa Mayer, the new chief of Yahoo, is pregnant with her first child, due in October. Ms. Mayer, 37, told Fortune that her maternity leave would be “a few weeks long, and I’ll work throughout it.”

With those nine words, she opened a new front in the debate over work-life balance and that nettlesome phrase “having it all.” The debate was already simmering in the wake of an article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who had been director of policy planning at the State Department but found, as she wrote, “that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

Ms. Mayer’s approach? “I like to stay in the rhythm of things,” she told Fortune.

The reactions — on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere — have varied widely. Some criticized Ms. Mayer as a poor role model for working women. Others congratulated her for embracing two challenges at once. Another camp marveled at her naïveté about what was in store.

But what about women who have already taken the path of an abbreviated leave? What do they make of the feverish parsing of Ms. Mayer’s postpartum plans? In interviews, many said that for women at the top of their profession or running their own show, the decision to not take a traditional leave can feel like an empowering choice — and at the same time, not a choice at all.

“You can think of a lot of moms who have more than one child, and do they ever say, ‘I’m going to stop feeding my older child because I have a newborn’?” asked Pooja Sankar, 31, chief executive of Piazza, an online forum for teachers and students to solve problems. Ms. Sankar, who gave birth to her first child three weeks ago, thinks of Piazza as one of her own, too: “I’m the C.E.O. of a company. This ‘child’ depends on me to run, to exist, really.”

Many women have no choice but to quickly return to work because they need the paycheck or can’t risk losing their job. And waitresses, nannies and teachers, for instance, can’t send e-mails from their iPhones and call it “working.”

New parents with the financial means have solutions that others don’t when they have to answer to both a newborn and a boss. Ms. Mayer, for example, will be able to hire as many nannies and baby nurses as she needs. Ms. Sankar’s parents and in-laws are living in her home in Palo Alto, Calif.

When Ivanka Trump flew to Miami on business eight days after giving birth to her daughter, Arabella, last summer, she rode in her father’s plane, returning late that night.

“The nature of the projects I was working on required me to have a hyper-abbreviated maternity leave,” said Ms. Trump, 30. “Yes, there are times when I look back and wish that had not been the case. But it’s life, and it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Still, the heavyweight questions that go beyond simple questions of money inevitably arise when a story like Ms. Mayer’s pops up. Is it progress for high-profile women to willingly forgo their right to a maternity leave? Or, by making maternity leave yet another victim of our always-on culture, does it send the message that taking true time off is only for the uncommitted?

These days, just as vacation is punctuated with work e-mails, maternity leave is not lived 100 percent disconnected, either. Some parents believe this half-on, half-off state is an unfair burden.

But some entrepreneurs like Maria Seidman, 34, of Manhattan say they don’t expect anything else. Two weeks ago, in the recovery room after the birth of her second child, she announced the event via (what else?) Yapp, the business she helped found. It helps people quickly publish mobile applications.

“Nobody had any expectations — not my team, my investors, or my family — that I would be in any way connected,” she said. “I wanted to do it. It was not an obligation. I was updating this app in real time, showing loved ones pictures of the baby. Was that work or life?”

Mrs. Seidman argued that maternity leave itself is “a false construct,” adding, “What does that mean in today’s fused world?”

Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind

Quora is not the only social technology company that presents an antisocial attitude to callers. Twitter’s phone system hangs up after providing Web or e-mail addresses three times. At the end of a long phone tree, Facebook’s system explains it is, in fact, “an Internet-based company.” Try e-mail, it suggests.

LinkedIn’s voice mail lists an alternate customer service number. Dial it, and the caller is trapped in a telephonic version of the movie “Groundhog Day,” forced to work through the original phone tree again and again until the lesson is clear: stop calling.

Voice calls have been falling out of fashion with teenagers and people in their 20s for some time (text only, please). But what is a matter of preference for the young is becoming a matter of policy for technology companies; phones cost money, phones do not scale. Besides, why call when you can use Google, or send a Twitter message?

On the other end of the line, however, some people may not know how to Google, or do not want to use Twitter. These users may be older, or less technically adept, and they are finding the method of communication they have relied on for a lifetime shifting under their feet. It does not make sense, they say, that a company with products used by millions every day cannot pick up the phone.

The companies argue that with millions of users every day, they cannot possibly pick up a phone.

“A lot of these companies don’t have enough employees to talk to,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. Facebook, for example, has just one employee for every 300,000 users. Its online systems process more than two million customer requests a day.

Google, which at 14 years old is a relative ancient in Silicon Valley, is one of the few companies that publishes phone numbers on its Web site. Its phone system sends callers back to the Web no less than 11 times. Its lengthy messages contain basic Internet education in a tone that might be used with an aging relative, explaining, slowly and gently, “There’s nothing Google can do to remove information from Web sites.”

Google initially tried to handle requests by e-mail, but even that proved too cumbersome. The company now steers incoming questions to online forums.

“All these companies stay away from phone support,” said Mikkel Svane, the chief executive of Zendesk, whose products help companies manage incoming requests. “People get aggressive or aggravated; people are depressed or crying. It’s just hard talking to customers,” he said, adding that these companies have paved the way in large-scale customer service by keeping everything online.

Officials at Facebook, Google and Twitter (all reached first by e-mail) say their users prefer to go online, finding it more pleasant and efficient than wading through a phone tree. But what about other business matters? What if, say, a prospective investor wants to call?

“If people need to get ahold of us, they definitely have sources inside,” said Derek Stewart, the finance director of Foursquare, whose personal cellphone has been mistaken for the company’s main office line. In Foursquare’s offices in New York, phone calls are considered a distraction to the developers and are conducted away from the main work area, in British-style red phone booths, the company’s spokeswoman said, explaining that calls are not part of developer culture.

Still, others see a social cost to this change, a deepening of the digital divide.

“The phone users are getting left out,” said Mari Smith, a consultant who trains businesses in how best to use social media. She should know. Because her consulting company lists an 800 number, frustrated people call all the time, looking for help with their Facebook accounts. She eventually adjusted her phone message to callers to explain that she does not provide technical support for Facebook.

“I just got bombarded,” she said. “They’re just so desperate to reach a real human being.”

Ms. Smith said she believed that large Internet companies might someday return to phones to set themselves apart from competitors. “The ability to call up and get a real human being — the companies who can do that and go back to basics are really the ones that will be winning out and humanizing their brand,” she said.

But for now, some people still feel frozen out when they pick up the phone.

Gabriel McKean, for example, was eager to start using Twitter. His 5-year-old daughter has a rare and painful genetic condition that turns her body’s soft tissue to bone, and the McKeans, who live in Bellevue, Ohio, started a Twitter account for “Ali’s Army” to raise awareness of her disease.

But the account was suspended in a matter of hours — Mr. McKean’s repeated posts of the family’s Web site were quickly flagged by Twitter’s systems as spam.

Upset and confused, he searched Twitter.com for a phone number, but found nothing. He sent an e-mail, but received only automated replies filled with jargon that confused him further. Without other options, he had no choice but to wait for someone to reinstate his account over e-mail.

He hoped to “plead his case” to someone over the phone, but that never happened. Two days later his account was reinstated via e-mail. Given that Twitter handles nearly 400 million messages every day, that might be considered a victory for efficiency and scale, but it did nothing to remove the sting Mr. McKean felt when he could not connect with a real person.

“The plain and simple fact is that they’re too busy or too important to talk to us,” he said.