The Cellphone Age Eclipse of the Landline Means Changes In Our Telephone Habits and Etiquette
By Jason Fry Wall Street Journal July 31, 2006 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115383713241716580.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today Last week I was having lunch with a friend when the talk turned to my New Year's tech resolutions, and progress I'd made on one front: I'd decided to let the cable-TV company take over our phone service, which should save us about $40 a month. (More on this in a week or two.) From there we got into phone etiquette, and my friend remembered calling a friend of hers as a young girl, and getting lectured by the friend's mother about the proper way to introduce yourself on the telephone. That's practically a universal experience, one of the many painful nudges toward adulthood: There's nothing like a thorough, unexpected dressing-down from an adult who's not a parent to turn "Is Andrew there?" into "Hello, this is Jason. Could I speak to Andrew, please?" My son Joshua hasn't had his phone-etiquette lecture yet; as I noted, at three and a half he's still too young to carry on any phone conversation, yet alone a polite one. But then I stopped. "Come to think of it," I said, "I don't think he'll ever get that lecture." "Why not?" my friend asked. "He'll have a cellphone," I said. "Not all the time," she pointed out. "Well, maybe he'll have an office phone," I said. "But it'll be his. In fact, it's possible Joshua will never answer a phone that's not specifically his." And then we kind of looked at each other. Could that really be true? Telephone habits and mores are changing -- witness quiet cars on trains, reminders to silence cellphones in theaters and innumerable arguments about mobile-phone etiquette. Slowly and surely, we'll find a social consensus on these questions. (Here's hoping it includes a prison sentence for the use of push-to-talk phones.) But other things are changing, too -- and we may not notice until they're gone. Our current cellphone etiquette is borrowed ("ported over," if you wanna be a geek about it) from landline etiquette. But it's not like a comprehensive list of telephone dos and don'ts arrived full-blown when Alexander Graham Bell yelled for Mr. Watson to come here. Telephone manners were the stuff of plenty of early arguments: Issuing an invitation over the phone, for example, was considered improper by some etiquette mavens as late as the 1950s. In the phone's early days we couldn't even agree on the right greeting. Some considered "Hello" vulgar, others thought "goodbye" too formal. (Bell favored "Ahoy-hoy" as a greeting -- a cultural road-not-taken preserved by Mr. Burns on "The Simpsons.") Even the weirdly voyeuristic, quasi-public nature of cellphone conversations has an antecedent in the landline: When party lines ruled the land, eavesdropping was a common pastime for the nosy or bored. These things got worked out, to the point that children could be lectured on phone etiquette by other children's parents. But my friend and I both grew up in the landline world of the 1970s and 1980s -- phones in houses and businesses, for the common use of people in those places, and you better not be calling long distance. Today, that world seems more like a creaky variation on the original model, with its interrupting operators and clunky old Bell system equipment, than any kind of antecedent of our own blizzard of teeny cellphones, BlackBerrys and devices blurring together. In fact, that old world is barely clinging to life. My friend hasn't had a landline for years; I'd get rid of ours if my wife would let me. Earlier this year, a Forrester Research study found that 18% of U.S. households with a mobile phone had either abandoned their landline, planned to do so, or had never had one. That's not a huge percentage, but contrast it to a few years ago when tech junkies were paying extra for additional lines for Internet access -- a period that will one day be discussed as the telcos' Prague Spring. As landlines disappear, the telecommunications companies are losing the Net-access battle to cable-TV firms. They're trying to squeeze more money out of their infrastructure by backing tiered pricing, with content providers who pay for it getting priority on networks. And, of course, they're becoming wireless carriers. I'll be stunned if my son ever has a landline. As for cellphones, I don't know when he'll get his first cellphone, beyond betting it'll be sooner than I think. (Any suggestions for what's the right age? I'm all ears.) He'll certainly have one by the time the teenage years roll around, and possibly long before then: witness cellphones explicitly designed for children, such as the Firefly. It's even possible I'll want him to have one as much as he'll want one. For better or for worse (I think mostly for worse), kids seem to have a lot less freedom these days. When I was in elementary school I walked there and back by myself, and after school my parents didn't necessarily know where I was. And as long as I showed up before dinner and homework got done, they didn't particularly worry. True, that was in suburban Long Island, not Brooklyn -- but more to the point, it was in the late 1970s, not 2006. It was before Columbine and 9/11 and whatever changed with parenthood along the way. These days parents feel they need to know where their kids are at all times, and I'm sure I'll be no exception. But if anything, a cellphone could mean more freedom for Joshua: If he had one, I might worry about him less. He'd be just a phone call removed, and with GPS slowly making its way into phones, I'll probably be able to keep tabs on him (or at least his phone) without having to call. Whenever Joshua gets that phone, he may have the only number he'll ever need. Like many thirtysomethings, I have a blizzard of discarded phone numbers behind me (I counted 17 and undoubtedly missed one or two along the way), and everything except a couple of childhood numbers and my current home and cellphone digits have vanished from memory. Now cellphones and Internet telephony have done away with the need to change numbers, rendering area codes as useless for determining location as the old system of exchanges. A map of my friends' and colleagues' cellphone numbers would show almost no correlation to where they actually live, but a very close correlation to where they lived when they signed up for their last cellphone plan before number portability. Sure, my kid may have lots of phones to go with that single phone number -- phones that, as discussed a few weeks back, may do things that seem like science fiction today. But I bet that number will stay the same -- it'll be a part of his identity, almost a second Social Security number. When his phone rings he'll know who's calling, and that person will know who's going to answer. Politely identifying himself to some third party, let along engaging in child/adult chit-chat, will seem as strange to him as being asked by an operator to yield a party line seems to us. ------------------[BOXED FEATURE]---------------------- PHONES: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE Some interesting reads about the history of phones, phone etiquette and more: The PBS series "The American Experience" contrasted our era of technological upheaval with the late 1800s. Here's a transcript of "The Telephone," which I now have to hunt for via TiVo. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/telephone/filmmore/transcript/index.html Prof. Naomi S. Baron of American University has a paper called "Who Sets Email Style?" (It's a PDF.) By way of background, she offers an interesting discussion of the evolution of phone manners. http://www.american.edu/lfs/tesol/2003%20Paper--Who%20Sets%20Email%20Style.pdf Prof. Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has some interesting thoughts about cellphones. https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/debaron/www/482/cellscenarios.htm ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
