Season 1, Episode 5: Functioning in Pre-Cell Phone America, Part 2
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
“A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
In the first part of this episode, we describe this predication made by Nikola Tesla about the cell phone.
But could Tesla also have predicted that these pocket phones would come to take place of watches, of letters, of maps, and of computers as a whole?
This is Was Is Could Be and this is the 2nd part of our series on phone communications in America - this time focusing on the cell phones.
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DOWN TO EARTH AND EASY TO FOLLOW!
“This down to earth podcast grabbed my attention. I felt like I was listening to a Public Radio broadcast. This is the type of programming I liked.”
With Special Guests:
Sarah Autumn - Sarah Autumn is a volunteer at the Connections Museum in Seattle, WA where she specializes in early 20th century telephone history. Her main role at the museum is the maintenance and restoration of telephone central office equipment from the 1920-1950 era, and her passion for this craft has earned her the honorary title of "Switch Witch." It's an appropriate moniker because the skills required to work on such large, complex, and obsolete machines look like magic to an outside observer. Sarah has traveled the country to track down and obtain some of the necessary parts and pieces for these machines, so they can be brought back to life for museum visitors to enjoy.
In her spare time, Sarah enjoys traveling, spending time with her cat, and playing a whole bunch of musical instruments. For her "day job", she is a technical educator at a Seattle area tech company.
John Nahor - John Nahor is a systems engineer who is fascinated by the way things work. Growing up in Old Forge, John found an appreciation for technology by tinkering with the abundant old equipment left in the basement of the 100 year old Tavern he grew up in. John is an avid hiker and proud dad.
Resources:
I find it almost impossible to explain ALL of the ideas and influences that come up while researching every episode. So here are just some of my most used and referenced resources for this week’s episode.
When Woman is Boss - The original text of the article citing Nikola Tesla as interviewed by John B. Kennedy. What he says about women is fascinating but the thoughts on phones is technically what pulled me in.
Connections Museum, Seattle - This episode would simply not have been possible without the Connections Museum where Sarah volunteers. If you’re in Seattle be sure to add this to your museum list!
The History Behind the Invention of the First Cell Phone - If you want to check out the large car phones that Sarah refers to in the beginning of this episode, check out this article by Interesting Engineering (plus embedded video!).
There Are Still 100,000 Pay Phones in America - I feel like the title to this should draw you in enough. I know that I just had to know… By the way, allegedly my home state of NY has to most (as of 2018).
The Impact of Digital Life - This Pew Research article features experts talking about the impacts a digital life; it was a jumping off point for me to see if this topic was viable.
50+ Smartphone Addiction & Cell Phone Usage Statistics 2020 - If you’re in doubt that the trends that John and I talk about are real, check out this amazing infographic. Did you know that 86% of people will check their phone while in conversation with family and friends? And that 69% of people check their phones within 5 minutes of waking up? You literally COULD NOT do that with a landline phone!
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
Want more? Follow the Was Is Could Be podcast on Instagram and Facebook.
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Liz Russell: “A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
In the first part of this episode, we describe this predication made by Nikola Tesla about the cell phone.
But could Tesla also have predicted that these pocket phones would come to take place of watches, of letters, of maps, and of computers as a whole?
This is Was Is Could Be and this is the 2nd part of our series on phone communications in America - this time focusing on the cell phones.
[🎶 Theme Music 🎶]
Liz Russell: Now I should tell you - I never actually intended to make a two-part episode of the phone thing. I wanted to focus purely on landlines and what they meant to American households.
But not talking about cell phones ended up making cell phones the elephant in the room. Every bit of conversation ended up treading into cell phone territory. And so, midway through my interviewees, I let my hair down a little bit and I decided to see where my discussion on cell phones would take us.
In this 2nd part of our two-part series, our telephone expert Sarah and my good friend John reflect specifically on how the amazing things about landlines became their downfall the minute we got cell phones.
As always - we’ll start with a little bit of history.
Sarah Autumn: It's worth mentioning, even that cell phones have been around forever. They've been around since at least the forties. It's just that only in the 1980s did they become small enough for folks like you and me to carry one around in our pocket or more often our purse. They were giant boxes that lived in the trunk of your car and then they had wires that went up in, but you know, underneath your dashboard and you could pick up the phone and call your home office if you're a repair person or a delivery person or something like that. You know, it was essentially a radio telephone, which is what your cell phone still is. It's a radio telephone. It's just also a computer, too.
The first popular cell phone was manufactured by Motorola in the early 1980s. It was called the Dynatac and it looked like a brick. It took 10 hours to charge and you had 30 minutes of talk time. And the early adopters there were somewhat unsurprisingly businesses like doctors, lawyers, um, you know, fancy, fancy businessmen who needed to be on the go and needed to be, you know, connected all the time -- stockbrokers, that kind of thing. And then I remember my mom got one and she had to get a bigger purse. I remember going to the department store and having to buy a bigger purse so the cell phone would fit in there. And I remember my dad having a car phone, you know, with a big suitcase. And the thing that, you know, that clicked into the center console of the car and you know, if your dad had a car phone, they were super cool.
Liz Russell: You mentioned those early adopters and a lot of those jobs you sound, you mentioned are jobs you gotta be available for. But you know, the day before those phones came out, if you're a doctor and someone needs to get ahold of you in an emergency, what did that look like? Were people just chasing you around town? Were they calling your wife? I mean, how did that happen as a doctor in the early nineties or whatever that time period was?
Sarah Autumn: Well, you know, it depends on two things. In the nine… certainly in the earlier days, in the 1950s you know, you would have to, if you need a doctor, the doc, you would have the doctor's home telephone number, right. As well as their office number. So you could ring the doctor at home and say, come quick, you know, uh, I need you for such and such. In the late seventies early eighties doctors would certainly have also had pagers, so, so they'd have a beeper that would go off no matter where they were. And then they would have to go to the nearest phone and call into the office.
Liz Russell: So why weren’t we satisfied with pagers?
Sarah Autumn: Well, you know, pagers were useful, but there's a limitation there, right? Because all you can do is when your pager goes off, you have to get up and then run to the nearest phone and call your office. But it's of course a lot easier just to have a cell phone where you can just put it to your ear and get the message right away. Or even in today's world, we don't even make the phone call. We just send a text. Right? That says, come quick, you know, I need you. And part of the reason for that was cost. You know, because any new technology, and you know, cell phones included are gonna cost too much for the average person to have, right? And it wasn't until the technology got better and the cost came down that the average family would even think about having a cell phone for mom and dad and maybe one for the kids.
You know, the newest best things are always more expensive because they're always on the bleeding edge of what we're capable of manufacturing. Right? But once you build a manufacturing infrastructure and also an infrastructure of cell towers everywhere, the costs naturally come down and you naturally want to… this technology, as a company anyway. You want this technology to get into the hands of as many people as possible so that you can make money. So, you know, certainly in Eastern Asia, manufacturing capability was just incredible and they were able to miniaturize things and put them in smaller, smaller and cuter packages. So, you know, Americans could now have cell phones that weren't maybe as bulky and had better service and better battery life and at a lower cost.
Seems to me that it was maybe around the late 1990s. There was a very popular model put out by Nokia that anyone who was, who had a cell phone in the late nineties, early two thousands, probably… you know, knew someone that had this phone and they were, you know, they were handing them out like, like free candy to everybody. The cell phone companies were, and they were just these really indestructible phones that were easy to use and convenient. And I think that was at least in that, in that period of time, you know, one of the contributors to the tipping point for everybody having cell phones. I think other contributors included the Motorola Raz’r, which was super cool. And you know, maybe around 2003/2004 timeframe. And then of course when the iPhone came out in 2007/2008 it's sort of changed everything.
Liz Russell: Everything. That’s what I want to talk about. Everything.
During my interview with John, he was so on top of this.
You’ll remember in Part 1, where John was talking about going out with his friends and how the news spread throughout the neighborhood? Well I asked John more about the expectations there. If you made plans with friends and expected them to spread via word of mouth, what was the outcome? It just seems like things would be a little bit chaotic!
John Nahor: It was like all sorts of other things like things you took for granted too was… now you have your cell phone. It's got a time on it. That time is synchronized with GPS time is synchronized with, you know, all the atomic clocks around the world, all that. So you’d you have good time. Well you had clocks in your house that were running on batteries and stuff and you didn't know if the time was right, but there was a service you called, you called the operator and asked the time and they gave you the time - the exact time because they had the exact time of what the real time was. So it was common for people that wanted to know what time it is to just pick up the phone. Uh, you know, “time please”. And the operator would give you the time.
Liz Russell: God, that's how was anybody ever on time ever was it? Was it just like more lax then to be like not quite on time?
John Nahor: I think so. Yeah. ‘Cause you know, the time was kind of uh, about this time, you know. People didn't have something in their pocket showing exactly what time it was all the time. You didn't really, and you didn't pay attention to. I mean as a kid you wanted to, your, your time was like, Oh, what time is it… oh, three o'clock, whatever time school ended. Okay. You watched the clock to get out of that. But you know, but other than that, you weren't really paying too much attention for the time.
Liz Russell: Once again, my mind had been blown.
John Nahor: That was kind of the way it was. It was, uh…
Liz Russell: Was it stressful? Not being able to get ahold of people or like having to always cause as again,
John Nahor: See I don't think, I don't remember it being stressful as much as just knowing, Oh that's the way it is. You know, ‘cause now it seems like you expect someone, you call someone and you expect them to pick up ‘cause you know, well they have their phone with them. Then it was… it wasn't like taking a chance, but it was like, okay… you made that attempt. You tried. And that was all, that's all you can do. And if, if it worked great, if it didn't work out, the person was around and you'd just have to wait and wait around and see what happens.
Liz Russell: I mean, I know you were younger, but in a business context it seems like everything would work way slower.
John Nahor: Oh yeah. You know, I think you're right. But then again, did…. I wonder about that? Like how…like people did do business and they did get things done and… You know, definitely like banking, like now… Like I, I even, I can't remember the last time I was at a bank. But if I do get a check, which is rare, I can just use my phone to deposit it. Where before you had, you know, everyone used checks and you had it, you know, and you had to deposit those checks. So I know my parents, it was like there was a, at least once a week, if not more, there was a trip to the bank cause it was a, you know, business deposit maybe. And I don't know if they had to make deposits every day if that, but it was every couple of days for sure. They'd have to go make deposits and then there was the whole thing of having, you know, there was really no… they didn't have any credit cards back then, so it was uh… or pay by your phone. It's like, uh, so there was the whole making sure…’cause I remember having to like go to the bank with money to get change and make sure they had enough change to be able to change for people in that type of thing and stuff.
Liz Russell: What we were on to here is that cell phones - really smart phones actually - have changed the way we do everything. I asked John to keep on going - what else had smart phones changed for us?
John Nahor: I'm, I'm trying to think of some example, you know. Okay, you just climbed to a top of a mountain. You're going to stand up there and like text every single person, you know, a pictures of you doing it up there because you couldn't. You actually enjoyed the moment. Took it in, took some pictures, maybe if you had a camera and then later on shared that at a reasonable time, not instantly, you know, which sometimes you can say, Oh Hey, you can say instantly is great. But also there's a whole... I think people are missing out on some of it..some of the things because they're spending too much time. Like you see people go to some type of an event that um, like a, like a sporting match or you know, some type of sporting event or a concert or something like that. And they just, they're filming it with their camera or their phone and it's like, why are you at the event? You can, you know…someone's probably recording it anyhow. You could watch their recording. Why are you there? You can't be enjoying it. You're just trying to get the right picture and make sure it's, Oh, someone didn't get in front of you or something like that or, I don't know. It's, um… it seemed like… if you're going to go to the trouble to try to communicate over the phone back then it wasn't easy, so it was important. It's almost like it was important to make that call where now, it's so easy to make a call. You're just, people are just using it all the time. It's uh, you know, and, and I'm not sure if it… I'm not sure it's better. It's like uh…
Liz Russell: So you brought up a good point. It’s this like social proof concept because like the reason people do that recording of the concert is so they can show it, “Oh I was at this concert”. It’s part of the reason, I should say. It's not the only reason, but it's part of the reason. I mean, I feel like basically what you're saying is you just didn't have that back then. Like you… you would show people your top of your mountain pictures like, but you probably would show it to people who you were talking to about it or who asked or it came up in conversation versus telling everybody hoping that someone would care or whatever.
John Nahor: This is the other thing too, is like you… okay… say -- this is kind of outside of our conversation with going to another technology – pictures. Like now you can just rattle off pictures on your phone and take videos and stuff, and then you just throw them away where then you want to like capture like, okay, we climbed this mountain and granted people still do this, but you know… let's get everyone together. Boom. We took this picture and you went to the trouble of making sure the picture was gonna, you know, the best you could imagine that when you took it, it was going to be a really nice picture. And then you could, then you had it in a, you know, you usually put it in a photo album or something like that. So later on you'll be with your friends. “Oh, check this out. Oh these are these photos.” And you had a, you know, it was usually the a… okay, that's just a photo of the group of people that climbed the mountain. What was really was then you got into that story of what happened that day was told, you know, so now it's, you know, you send me that picture. “Oh they climbed them mountain. Okay.” And that's it. And then that picture goes away and there's no record of it. It's not like years from now you're going to be showing your kids, “Hey, when we climbed this mountain, this was such a great day” because that picture is going to be gone. Probably because it's electronic and you never thought to, you know… it's going to be a different medium, an old medium that you can't show it on or something like, cause of changes. You never thought of actually printing it and saving it somewhere.
So now… there's generations of people now and they're probably aren't going to be photographed or remembered through their photographs like that. And, uh, and granted you would think something, you know, okay. You can think back with some of the older pictures, real old when they had to stage them cause they, you know, it wasn't, you know, to actually take a picture, you had a stand there and you had to stand for a number of seconds and stuff like that and, and you know, do that. And so there's, you know, you would think like, Oh, why you would want more information about really what happened. And it wasn't staged where… and then it got to be like, okay, you could do more instant cameras, you know, film. So, but you still had to wait until it could get developed. But now, now it seems like that, that um, those pictures are just, and I'm doing it too.
It's like a, I there, there's old pictures. I think about that too. Like my son, there's digital pictures of my son. I'm like, where are they now? Can I actually look at them? Are they on a hard disk? And I'm not even gonna be able to access anymore. Where the photographs sure that over time they can fade away until they, we ain't gotta take care of them and things like that. But I don't know, it just seems like people are just more like, I got to delete these photos because I need more room to take more photos in it.
Liz Russell: But even on the photographs and on the phone, like we use phones for everything now and they're not just phones, they’re computers. Which obviously didn't happen before. So with that being said, I think the, the value of a phone in our pocket to us is different because it's not just about getting the calls, it's about getting other stuff too. You said it was a little bit better to have that less communication?
John Nahor: So you bring up…yeah… So I was focused on just that communication part and I'm thinking about how people just have to be… have their phones and they have to no matter what… like, like say, like document every little thing to send to their groups or friends and stuff like that to get maybe get that satisfaction of, “Hey, look where I am”. And I guess I'd probably done that to you. Like, “Hey, look, where I am, I'm here”. But it's, it's easy to do that now and stuff like that. But you also…but you're right about some of the features you can do with the phone, like banking online and stuff like that. It's so… you know, today I had to pay bills. It was… I got up before I even got out of bed, got on the phone, boom. Just went to the bank and paid bills instead of, I mean it was a process to pay bills before – writing out checks, putting them in the mail, you know, put ah… you know, get them in an envelope, put a stamp on it, make sure you had stamps, get them, you know, go put them in the mail.
Liz Russell: You know what just went through my head? I was like, “Oh my God, how did people pay bills before the internet.” I could not think of the stamp. They want to start to say write a check and stamps. I was like, Oh yeah, that's a bit sad. But so, but… well for me it's GPS. Like I can't get anywhere without my phone ‘cause I don't know where I'm going.
John Nahor: The thing though is that is … ok, at work one of the things I do is I work with GPS, so I use it for my work… What I… you know, I'm an engineer and, and that's part of the engineering work that I do is GPS stuff. But also, like I've used both my phone and my GPS in my car to be places and it's gotten me in trouble. Like, like literally like that road doesn't exist and, or it's telling me he's either telling me to go on a road that doesn't exist or I'm on a road and it's showing that I'm driving through fields and a lake and stuff. And that's happened to me. So it's not perfect. And I… granted, but also what you did is you spent a little bit of time -- you had maps and you spent time, like if I was going to go somewhere and it sounds so like “Oh my gosh, it's so much work” now because you can just plug in -- is you looked at the maps and you figured out the roads and you kind of memorized where you're going and you figured it out. So when you were driving you knew, “Oh yeah, I gotta get off on I-90 here and this is the exit now,” ‘cause you've already looked it up and you knew it and what it was
Liz Russell: So today knowing that you have access to the GPS, knowing that you have access to the phone features, would you ever just leave your phone at home and live kind of the old-fashioned way for like five days?
John Nahor: I, you know, as far with the GPS thing, I think I would, because I was, I'm really into maps and stuff like that. So I kind of like, it's not that I don't, I definitely don't look at them as much, but I also, when I pick them up and start doing that, I started going, “Oh yeah, this is the way it should be done.” Because one of the things I don't like about GPS is like you go somewhere and you want to get off the road less traveled say, type thing. But you… I haven't looked at the map to memorize the area yet. So like I used to like know and like, “Oh yeah, I know if I go up here I can get on this road and get back here” or something like that, you know. Or, or, know generally the area where with GPS then I can't… like when you're driving you can't… like especially I know the GPS in my car, it's like… I want to find a different way to go. I don't want to go the way you're telling me, but it won't let you not and then you get… So you, you try to go some other way and you want a… you're hoping that it'll tell you, yes, you can get back or, but it won't, it keeps turning “Do a U-turn. Go back,” you know. It's like one of those… you’re kind of stuck to what it has defined for you. And I think like… it used to be, you got an atlas out or maps out and you go, you start looking and you go, “Oh yeah, we got to go here. We've got to go to grandma's house.” But then you go, “Wait a second, if we go over here, we can see this, you know, tourist attraction” that you didn't think about going or someplace you've heard about and you realize, “Oh, that's close to where we're going. That'd be a better route to go” or something different to do instead of just taking that route that is defined by the GPS. So…
Liz Russell: But if I confiscated your phone, like ignore the GVS thing for a second. If I confiscated your phone…
John Nahor: So the problem I would have on my phone would be… so as far as phone calls go, I can ignore phone calls and stuff like that. I do, you know, I guess get excited or something, if someone calls, there's like that, “Oh, this person… great.” There's times I think that text messaging is helpful, but there's not like… but also I wonder about that too. I'm kinda going off I think because like my parents don't text. They have trouble using any technology. And there's times where like say I'm communicating with a friend of mine, someone I know I, we can work something out over text. But now I gotta work a similar thing out with my parents. They don't have text, so it's just like, okay, it's going to be a phone call. It's going to be a different way of handling this, you know, and it's just, you're kind of, it's not like it's the end of the world. It's just like, Oh gee, if they only could text, we got to get them to text because it would make life better. It's like, Oh, it's just a different way of doing it. And maybe it's a slower way of doing it, but it works out. So the phone thing, the texting, I could probably go out with, um, having the banking would be hard for me. I couldn't, I couldn't go back. I don't think I could go back, you know, banking and actually I don't even know if the technology is still there to go back. If you can actually go to banks and they have anyone there, it's like the a yeah, no one goes right...
Liz Russell: I haven’t been in a bank in years so I have no idea…
John Nahor: So, uh, and it would be hard to, cause now you know, for paying your bills online, you also, so it's, there's a say there's a due date and you want to, you know, that due date, you can pay right up to that the two days before, whatever it is, you know, where now if you’re mailing it, you got to go, “okay, how long is it going to take the mail to wherever.” You don't know, you know. And so this bill has to go to Denver, Colorado for some reason let’s say, you know. Okay, how long is it going to take the mail? So I gotta back up and then you got to put in some extra days because it could get held up in the mail for some reason, you know. So you, you know, you want to make sure it's on time. So it's a… it's a little bit more planning to, you know, before then, uh, and then, you know, writing out the checks, doing all that stuff. It's sitting down and it takes a while to like sit down, get all the bills out right now. Like…to pay on your phone. It's like there's the bill click, click, click, boom. It's done. So I can see it would be hard for me to give up the banking. It would be.
Liz Russell: But if I took your phone and you like you're going on a trip this weekend, would that stress you out? Like knowing that you didn't have like if an emergency happened or…
John Nahor: I could see what you're saying cause before. Okay so it's hard to go back in time with like an emergency or having to get ahold of someone or you needed a phone because it used to be you could find a… or find a payphone and you can't do that anymore. There's very few pay phones. In fact, growing up, ‘cause I was a business, there was a pay phone in our house so we had like, we had a regular phone and then it was also in the lobby of the, ‘cause we lived in the same building as the business was in the restaurant was in. In the lobby, there was a payphone. So we, so we always thought we had two phones and we could have, and so people that knew us if you needed to get a hold of us and he's like, here's this other, I actually still remember the phone number.
I was like, yeah… the number of the pay phone was 369-9997 and um, and our home phone was 369-3033, when we got the dial stuff. Before that it was 205. And that was another thing too, you memorized everyone's phone number. Well now you, I bet you, you don't know anyone's phone number cause it's just a… it's already, you punched it into your phone.
Liz Russell: I um, I remember phone numbers of people. I had to dial as kids, so I had to call their house. And then I remember some emergency numbers, like Brad, I didn't meet till I was 23 and had a cell phone. But you know, it was kind of one of those things where it was like, if I don't have access to my cell phone, I need to be able to call him. And I don't know why that came up, but sometime I committed it to memory on purpose.
John Nahor: Yeah. So like, yeah, for me, 99% of the, the phone numbers in my phone, I don't know what they are. They're like, if I had to call that person, I have like, I don't know what their phone number is. It's uh… I'm thinking, I'm trying to think of whose… I barely know mine and uh, and uh… I might think my parents' home phone, I think I, I think I could come up with, but like their cell phone, I have no idea what it is. It's a… like I said, I remember phone numbers growing up and I can remember the payphone phone number at our house and it's not like I ever called there… it's like, I just knew it.
Liz Russell: So if you were driving to Connecticut in the 80s, you would, and you were going to have an emergency or whatever you would plan to use a payphone or are you plan to stop at a place and ask to use a phone? If you were to do that today, how do you think that would work out?
John Nahor: I don't see, I don't think, I think it would be hard. I don't… I think it'd be really, really hard to find a payphone ‘cause people have their cell phones now. So I think even if you stopped at a business, it's like they would be like, eh, it's my cell phone. I'm not going to use it type thing. They would be, you know, try to direct you to a pay phone if they knew or it was one somewhere.
Liz Russell: Or do you think they would like you’re just a giant weirdo?
John Nahor: Yeah. Probably like, yeah. Why don't you have your own phone?
Liz Russell: I do think there's like an assumption, like, no, you should have a phone and therefore like you must be tricking me.
John Nahor: Like, yeah. Why would someone, why wouldn't someone already I have a phone.
Liz Russell: Yeah. Especially if you're traveling. Yeah. I feel like if you were on to be like, Oh, I'm traveling and I just need to call blah blah. A lot of people would be like, Oh, this is weird. If you're traveling you should have your phone.
So - the central question here: is this all a good thing? Are we happy about cell phones as super computers right in our pockets?
John Nahor: So I, I I find it very annoying now that when you're with someone and you’re having a conversation and talking and their phone beeps and that's immediately they’re… That's the most important thing is their phone…where growing up with not having, you know, the phone was like this way, to communicate, but it wasn't the most important thing… yeah sure. When the phone rang here, everyone…you know the phone rang is… you know, answer the phone. You gotta answer the phone ‘cause someone's trying to get ahold of you. Yes. But it wasn't like now I… it seems like knowing that like say you could miss a call… it wasn't like you were like, “Oh my gosh, I missed a call” or that you go, “Oh it was taken care of.” Someone took a message for your or they call back later or something like that, where now it's like, if that's not addressed right away, it's almost a… I don't know, people go too crazy and I see this at work, like I'm having a conversation with somebody about work and then the phone rings and they go right to that and I'm like, Oh, so I'm not important in this conversation. My time is not important enough. And that like wouldn't happen then ‘cause he didn't have that phone right there all the time. Families weren't interrupted when they're sitting around dinner at the dinner table or anything like that. I don't know, I find it maybe less communication might be better as far as communicating electronically through the phones and all that right now and the text messaging and all that. It's almost like it was a better way of life before. ‘Cause a lot of that… I guess back then it seemed like if a phone call was made, it was important. Now it's, you know, a cat video that just got text to you.
Liz Russell: John had a great point here. But it led me to another question. Texting. John mentions that we leave in-person conversations all the time to send some fast texts. But is texting really communicating? I mean… is it a way of communicating well with people?
I text all the time. But there are sometimes when a text can’t do what a call can - especially when you’re explaining difficult concepts or telling a long story. I asked Sarah - our expert - to talk a little about that.
Sarah Autumn: You know, I see in, in a lot of ways society tends to regress. I don't even want to use the word regress but regress to previous technologies in the same way that I might say, Oh, I prefer listening to an album on vinyl, on record than I do on MP3 because I think it sounds better. There's something really nice about putting the record on the turntable and then putting the needle down and then listening to it, right? And, um, you brought along the parallel of it's nicer to hear your mom's voice, you know, uh, because we want to, we want to engage all of the senses, right? As many senses as possible when interacting with another human. Um, and I don't know if folks of our generation will, some will someday go back to preferring phone calls.
I do know that we have managed to fill in a lot of the gaps, with um things like emoji, you know, or, or memes or gifs because we find that, okay, if we're going to say collectively that texting is better than talking, we have to find other methods, right, of conveying emotion that aren't just letters, I'm typing with my thumbs, which is why we have emoji and, you know, stuff like that. So, you know, I do think it is much nicer to hear the voice of your loved one. I also personally think I'd much rather see my loved one in person than talk to them on the phone if I had a choice, you know?
Liz Russell: I asked Sarah to reflect on the same thing. Are cell phones inherently bad for communication?
Sarah Autumn: You know, I would say that some people would say yes. I would say no. Although I can see why you might feel that way. I don't feel that our communication has gotten any less meaningful. It's just that the, the method changes, the vehicle changes, right? So just like, you know, someone from the 1800s would say, well, you should write a letter and you or me or you know, someone would say “that’s ridiculous, I'll just call them”. And, but you can look back into history and you can sort of see the previous generation complaining that the next generation isn't appreciating the full body of something that they appreciate, right? And the next generation of course, will say, “well, that's ridiculous. I… of course, I appreciate it.” But then that next generation goes and says the same thing about the subsequent generation. Right? And I'm sure that we'll be saying it about the generation coming after us. So that's just my perspective on it. And I think that as long as our communication systems work for us, and as long as we're able to use them to convey what's in our hearts and what we're really feeling, then however we do that is fine whether we're talking into a microphone or we’re sending emoji over some computer somewhere.
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Liz Russell: So, has the advent of the cell phone been a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, it’s a bit of both! In a way, we’re more connected than we’ve ever been. We know when emergencies happen. We can share more information and thoughts and ideas than we ever could before. And we can be more human… sharing our emotions and connecting with each other in many more ways.
But it seems we have lost a bit of the freedom that we once had. The freedom of not totally knowing the time. The freedom of not being totally available 100% of the time. The freedom of knowing that our neighbors would come find us if there was an emergency, and that the neighborhood kids would eventually find us and stumble on our outdoor game.
The reality is it takes some discipline to have the cell phone on us, and to still hold back on its use so that we can enjoy these other freedoms.