JUST KEEP TALKING….
“Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.” Stephen Hawking, British theoretical physicist.
Phones and computers have changed a lot since my childhood.
The household phone for the masses was still quite a luxury item when I was young. Not everyone I knew had a phone. No one I knew took a phone for granted.
If you had a household phone, it was normal to have a coin box next to it, so that people who were not a member of your household paid for any calls they may have to make on your luxury device. Phones were NOT for chatting. They were for news and the lines must always be kept clear in case someone was trying to reach you. It was a firmly held belief that the telephone was to impart information or make arrangements on, but it certainly was not a social tool. There was always a pen and paper by the phone, so you could commit to paper the received news, and then it was expected that the phone be back in the cradle pronto.
Adult calls were short and to the point, and almost every adult I knew had a ‘telephone voice’. My mother used to leave her sultry resonance behind her when she answered the phone and become like a shrill version of Joyce Grenfell “E.L.T. 3152?” she’d say on answering… her mouth pinched into the shape of pigeon’s anus. Suddenly we were all referred to by our full names if the call was for us… “Jacqueline..it’s for you” and she’d pass the phone to me with the warning…”don’t be long”.
As phones caught on, we were the first generation who tried to use phones socially, but we were thwarted at every move. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t chat on the phone as if your house was blessed with a one it would doubtless be in the hallway and all your business would be broadcast to your entire family. (We had a way to go before the walkabout phone came in). Plus any household with teenagers in it had a dial lock. (For those too young to remember this beautiful piece of technology…it was basically like a bicycle lock... but for phones. This was back in the day when numbers had to be dialled not punched. The householder would lock figure 1 – rendering it impossible to dial any other digit.) A telephone was considered a luxury of the highest order and no one wished to have teenagers yapping away when they would see each other instead. As a consequence social networks were very local.
The home computer was in its infancy. Commodore and Sinclair made a couple of fancy machines but we had a way to go before Amstrad put one in every middle class home. We were working class, so the home computer revolution was played out somewhere else for at least another decade. If you wanted to stay in touch with someone a long way away, you had paper, envelope and a stamp. We were the last generation with pen-pals. Although posting and receiving letters was still very popular, land mail was not something that satisfied the need for day to day gossip. The only e-mail was if your postman’s first name began with an E.
Word had reached us of a few new fangled machines, including the wonder that was the telex… (Again for those too young to recall this machine, this was the forerunner of the fax and e-mail… it received long distance wireless transmissions in a format that looked like brail, then the local operator would type it up for you in plain English!). But these things lived in offices and never made it the home front. To most of us computers needed rooms of white cabinets and were the business of boffins.
Given that the phone was rationed and that texting, e-mailing, and social networking sites had not yet left the lab… how on earth did we stay in touch?
I’m afraid we used to communicate in a rather prosaic fashion. If you wanted to stay up to date about what was happening in your social circle… you actually had to spend time with your social circle.
You saw your friend at school, she asked you if you were going to Billy’s party, you said yes, and you would meet her at 7pm Saturday at the clock tower, so you’d go together. And that was that. If you were not at the clock tower at 7pm on Saturday – your name would be mud. (We didn’t need social networking sites to trash someone’s rep. – a word in the right ears and you better hope your parents are moving to
Not that Telecommunications didn’t have a huge part to play in youth.
Dial- a- disc was a huge thing when I was young. Me and 2 mates would huddle in a phone box and we'd splash out the cost of local call so we could listen to Midge Ure and Slik sing “Forever and Ever” (or what ever the song of the moment was) over and over again! We’d take it in turns, one to hold the receiver, who would share it with the other listener – they’d sing along and the third wheel (who got to sit up on the phone directories and swing her legs) would join in singing. When the track finished, we’d shuffle positions. We were very democratic.
Occasionally rather than use phone boxes to listen to a loop tape of a chart song we’d use phone boxes to make and receive calls to people. Sometimes as a big punishment our parents would suspend our phone rights so we couldn’t make or take calls at home. To be honest, phones were only really used to confirm arrangements, so we never took this as too much of a hardship. Never the less we got around these sporadic embargos by using the phone box for free calls. How it worked was on connection of a call there was a 30 second gap where you were supposed to insert coins. Instead you’d just shout the phone box number down the receiver at your mate – and they’d ring you back.
I found a phone box the other day… a proper one. Stepping inside it made me feel like I’d step into a time capsule. The faint smell of cold metal and urine; the suddenly muffled street sounds; the old-fashioned bulk of the telephone equipment; the slight odour of spittle in the receiver; the forgotten sensation of standing still to make a call. What struck me was the slowness and simplicity of it all. Phone Boxes were designed for talking, not multi-tasking. To use a phone box was to surrender oneself entirely to the exercise of connecting.
Funny enough in all the years I used a phone box I never once began a call with ‘I’m in a phone box’… and yet how often on its replacement, the mobile phone, do we firstly state our location! “I’m on the train”. (!) But to be fair the mobile phone is not a device for simply making calls, it is as its name implies a communications device for a life lived on the move.
Life is very different now. Of course, my generation were at the cusp of a change. To contact my friends these days I have my landline, my mobile, my e-mail, and my social networking sites. I am absolutely contactable.
I’m actually not very old, yet it is a mighty long journey I have travelled when it comes to telephones and computers.
From a childhood with a pocket on my gym-pants which held a coin for an emergency call (in PE???) to an adulthood with a phone in my pocket. From a childhood spent in phone boxes ringing 160 Dial-a-disk, to hear the latest chart tunes, to an adulthood with 824 radio stations and 534 satellite channels, playing any music I choose into my personal phone.
From a childhood where computers were suites of rooms with big spinning tapes held in white cabinets, to an adulthood where my laptop (the size of my table mat) gives me access to the whole world.
Will I be able to say I have lived long enough to see computers miniaturised into oblivion? 21st Century laptop technology is now being routinely incorporated into mobile phones.
My mobile is hardly top of the range and yet it tells me it makes calls but also picks up radio, plays tunes, connects to the internet and it sends text messaging and photographs –plus it also shoots a mean video. One little device the size of a dogs paw, and I have audio visual communiqué with the planet!
And yet... even with all this telecommunications technology – I wonder if we have lost something of the very human art of communication?
One of my friends is in a quandary as she doesn’t know whether to upgrade to a Blackberry or an I-phone. At the last count she had 22 comments on her social networking page giving her advice on which to get.
There you go Stephen Hawkins… is THIS what you meant when you suggested that with the technology around us we’ll keep talking?
Is it all a little without the effort of investment of time? If mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking… I just wonder if it was less the talking and more the fact that talking used to demand the physical proximity of other person. Is it all just a little remote?
Or could you say that twenty two different people took the time out to give my friend advice. Twenty two different people who care enough about her dilemma enough to take the time to type a few words of advice. That’s still real communication – isn’t it?
I dunno… maybe it’s because I’m a 20th Century gal that at moments like this I get a little nostalgic for MY century. For the days when if you were unsure about what to buy… you asked a mate… they came over... and together….you went shopping.
NOW YOU’RE TALKING!
If you had a lock on the phone you could tap out a phone number on the clicky bits that the receiver pushed down. Of course it didn't work for numbers with a zero in them.
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