First, telephones start out as expensive, only available in big cities. I'm not old enough to remember this, but I suspect it would have been an exclusive and prestigious club.
Eventually, telephones get widespread, and cheaper - I'm thinking like mid 90s, before mobile phones became mass market. This was "peak telephone", and it's what I remember from my youth. It was actually pretty good! As the author says, you could casually call your friends without seeming intrusive or clingy, and you could call most business or government agencies and talk to staff, getting quick responses to inquiries from knowledgeable people. Towards the end of this era, you have lots of information lines for time, weather, movies, phone banking services, etc.
Around this time, call centers are introduced - if you call a business or government agency, you don't end up talking to some knowledgeable subject matter expert about some topic, you talk to a call center operator who has a script, and if it's anything non-trivial, tries to transfer you, call back, or generally mess you around.
At this point, the phone network is so cheap, with so many subscribers that the temptation to abuse it to sell things to people is irresistible. Robo-dialling, answering machines, caller ID, and the Do Not Call registry are all introduced to the system, in a nuisance call arms race between callers and callees.
The call centers go to India, and the Philippines. The call center operators get placed behind a interactive voice response system (IVR). Now, it's pretty much impossible to get anything useful done by phone. Landlines are disconnected, people have voice numbers on their mobile devices, but refuse to answer calls from numbers that aren't in their address book.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the fundamental nature of communications networks - the story isn't much different for postal mail, fax, email, usenet, facebook. Success seems to kill the network in the end.