No medium is the rich one

Around Ramadan, phones across Jeddah fill with greetings. Some are long video messages. Some are a single line of text. A few people still send a printed card, carried by hand to the neighbour's door.

It is tempting to rank them. The video has a face and a voice, so it must be warmer. The card took effort, so it must mean more. The one line of text looks lazy.

The ranking is often wrong. A forwarded video, with music and a stranger's voice, says less than one sentence that uses your name and remembers what your year has been like. A card from a shop that has not spoken to you since last year arrives as noise, however thick the paper.

The same is true when a business speaks to people. A showroom with lights, music and attentive staff looks as if it must beat a plain message from a small seller. Sometimes it does. Often a short note from someone the customer already knows, arriving at the moment the customer was wondering, does more than the whole floor.

How much a format can carry is rarely what decides it. What decides it is whether the sender made full use of what was in their hands, whether the message came when it was wanted rather than when it was convenient to send, and whether it leaves the other person with a reason to trust them a little more.

So the question of which is better, the call or the visit, the card or the text, has only one honest answer. It depends, and mostly it depends on the sender.