1 week ago
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When something becomes old and then new again during my lifetime, I might be forgiven for feeling at once quite aged and a little sentimental.
But suggestions that the landline telephone may be having a cultural renaissance just make me feel old and somewhat triggered by experiences of fraught teenage social negotiations over the long obsolete rotary dial phone of my youth.
I remember vividly the first time a girl called 14-year-old me at my family home on the landline. My mother answered the phone which sat on a bench in a book-lined downstairs room we reverentially called “the den” which included a special shelf for the White and Yellow Pages (remember them?). Mum gave this caller the third degree – who was she and what did she want? – before eventually summonsing me to the phone to name the “very forward” girl asking to speak to me.
Kill me now. Just the memory …
That was the thing about the landline. It pretty much ensured that parents and siblings could glean way too much about any fledgling romantic and social interactions just as we learned a lot about our parents because of a) the people who called them, and b) what we deliberately or otherwise overheard them talking about over the landline.
I know – smartphones have done all sorts of evil to our own and our kids’ brains. They have also totally changed the way phone calls are made and received.
Back home in the late 1970s when the phone rang in the den it was a family moment. You’d answer formally – Hello, 8361 …(this was part of our actual number and its entirety is burnt into my memory along with the home numbers of some of my closer cousins and friends), Paul speaking.
If it was someone I knew (an aunt or uncle who seemed to call Mum every day, one of Dad’s business associates or a friend of my sister) some polite conversation would ensue before the intended recipient was notified.
Similarly, when I’d ring a mate I might first have to speak to one of his siblings or his parents about the weather, the Collingwood football club’s malaise, my beach holiday, schoolwork, or what I was reading or listening to lately.
The brnng-brnng of the phone was always a household moment. Was it ringing for me or was it a portent of bad news about an elderly relative … or maybe just something prosaic from the dry cleaner, the vet or the mechanic? Regardless, the landline was uniquely integral to the (semi-)open book of family life.
It would ring totally without warning. Now, when our smartphones ring unexpectedly with an actual unheralded phone call, we are startled. Many people text to presage voice calling someone else and they get anxious before ringing strangers about administrative matters.
Anyway, nobody actually rings or dials any more (I remember decades ago when our son was startled by the dusty old rotary dial phone in my parents’ garage as if it were some instrument of torture or intergalactic messaging device).
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There is no doubt that the social art of telephone conversation has changed markedly, especially among those who’ve never known the landline.
It also makes sense that some families are nostalgic for a time when the smartphone was not a bodily and neural extension of each child and adult, when social/telephonic communication did not amount to a constant, distracting loop of private texts and notifications though rarely a conversation – but a ringing in the hallway, kitchen or den.
Privacy (and its double-edged sword, welfare threats unknown to us as parents) has dimensions for our children, thanks in part to the demise of the landline, that I could not have imagined, just as they will never understand how much my parents gleaned about me from the landline. My adult kids’ romantic lives, for instance, have pretty much always been completely opaque to me until they’ve wanted them otherwise.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. It just is.
To illustrate how things have changed I could tell them, perhaps, about the girlfriend I had at 17 whose tyrannical father, if he answered, would convey to me no matter when I’d rung that that my call was “intrusive and inconvenient” before hanging up on me.
But I’m not sure they’d quite believe it. It would be as alien to them as that rotary dial landline in their grandparents’ garage.
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Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
