Is This the Death of Telephone?
The demise of the landline has gone almost unnoticed.
After all, the din of mundane phone chatter is all around us-
on the bus, at the next table in a restaurant.
What difference does it make
whether the cables lie underground or not?
A lot, actually.
The death of the landline is a cultural shift
that affects our personal and public lives.
It has freed us from our groupings-in the office,
where email has disconnected us
from what the people who sit three feet away do all day,
and even more significantly, at home.
In any household in the days before mobiles took over,
the landline served as a switchboard
for everyone's connections outside the home.
The phone rang, you answered it,
you asked who was calling,
and then you passed the phone over.
Everyone knew who called you, and how long you spoke for.
Within families, couples, flatmates,
it was a kind of invisible knowledge map
about the state of everyone's romantic and social lives,
and one we took for granted.
Now, we are all freelance operatives.
And devoted though we are to our mobiles,
most of the time we aren't talking but typing.
Comic Relief this year
heavily promoted the option to donate by text,
to save you having to actually speak to anyone.
Office culture has become increasingly silent.
As someone who learned how to do my job as a junior
by listening to people around me-
editors commissioning, writers interviewing-
I wonder how today's young people learn the ropes.
Now that the corner office is as retrospective as Mad Men,
open-plan culture demands a level of quiet.
But it's odd, on a personal as well as a professional level.
When I started work,
you knew everything about the person who sat next to you,
because they had no choice
but to conduct their relationships with their lover,
their mother, their bank manager from their desk phone,
while you had no choice but to pretend not to listen.
These days, all you overhear is the clatter of typing,
the lull while they wait for a response,
and then the rapt concentration
when the emailed reply appears.