Harry Veeder wrote:
At least you weren't forced to learn how to dial a rotary telephone!
;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zjlLb0tqGs&feature=related
I love this! It is fascinating, and thought provoking. And it is
quality work, too. It is an old-fashioned but still slick and well
done. Count on the phone company to do a good job educating the customer.
Some observations:
Look how formally people dressed merely to attend a product demonstration.
Note that the woman giving instructions about how to dial tells the
audience a little more than they need to know, when she shows the
dial registering 4 digit numbers as a series of lights. It often
happens with new technology that when people explain it they tell the
audience more than the audience needs to know. I'll bet few people in
1960 realized that a telephone sends the number you dial as you dial
it back to the central office. (The woman did not say the phone sends
dial pulses, with one pulse for each increment, but that's the
concept she was explaining.)
The people in this audience were capable of using much more
complicated and difficult machines than most people are today, such
as a horse and buggy or a Model T Ford. But they still had some
difficulty understanding the concept of dialing, what was waiting for
the dial tone and pushing the dial all way around to generate the
correct number of dial pulses. These concepts are more difficult to
grasp than we realize.
By 1960 children learning how to dial were not told these things
explicitly. They picked up this sort of knowledge by osmosis, as it
were. Many people probably never even realized what would happen if
you stopped turning the dial before it reached the end; but they just
learned by observing that's how you do it. (Kids like me, on the
other hand, experimented with not turning the dial the whole way or
stopping it on the way back. I distinctly remember doing this.)
It is much harder to teach an entire community how to do something
like this from scratch than it is to teach individual children when
their parents already know. I have books from the 1970s and '80s such
as P. McWilliams, "The Personal Computer Book" that explain things
about computers which everyone now knows, such as the difference
between insert and overwrite with a word processor, and what it means
to copy and paste text. In 1980, just about everyone in society
needed to learn how to do this sort of thing, so we needed books and
videos. We needed a concerted, deliberate effort. Now, nearly
everyone learns it at home by watching parents and siblings.
The phone company said they making an effort to build Central Offices
that blend in with the community architectural style and look
attractive. That cost them extra but it is a good thing. Corporations
worried about their public image are nothing new, and it is good that
they worry about this. I have late 19th-century magazines and books
from Sears and elsewhere that express similar concerns.
You can learn a great deal about attitudes and people lives from
cultural artifacts such as this.
- Jed
