Hear Me Out: Going Off the Hook

Forget locking in, dial in. Dial in specifically to a time with the landline phone, I say. But really, any public phone in a box that looks anything like these. Publicly available telephones were gorgeous mainstays, now left to rut and rust on the side.

It wouldn't be a leap for me to declare that we are attached to our mobile telecommunications devices. From doom-scrolling to gloom-scrolling, to more and more doom-scrolling, there are so many studies that suggest we rely on dopamine hits manufactured by social media conglomerates. It's problematic, it's enticing, it's freeing, and it’s pricing. I myself rely on my phone's capacity for a few key things. Google Maps-ing, the notes app, playlists, and WhatsApp for texting and calling. Across my twenty-five years of existence, there have been times where what was once a rudimentary device, has become all encompassing.

We expect so much from phones these days. The iPhone came, then subsequently the Blackberry with BBM... Now it's five million cameras for that one crucial shot, that will ultimately pile up in a cloud, to be stowed away forever in a data centre in either Northern Virginia or Culver, Oxfordshire. The inevitable march of venture techno-capitalism marches on and on. Now the iPod touch is anything but in-touch.

A BlackBerry Phone from 2008. Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. No modifications made to the original. Second photo: rusting payphones in Brighton station - my own.

(L-R) Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy in His Girl Friday, 1940. Dir. by Howard Hawks, Produced by Columbia Pictures. In the public domain. No adjustments made to the original.

There are awe-inspiring things about technology, where used appropriately. Vital emergency service calls without a signal. With a few touches of a button, I can inform my family of my Uber ride in its entirety, and where I am located along this route. Not something I've tried, but an important safety feature nonetheless. Someone can just as quickly geolocate devices or users in a pinch. One friend of mine periodically checks in on the movements of his phone after he lost it drunkenly skinny dipping in the Philippines. Alarm clocks are built in! Let's be honest, while I like some retro furnishing, Defunct alarm clocks haven't reached the top of my personal Feng shui list, just yet. Maybe I should turn the clock back in that sense as well?

Modern smartphones bring many supposed positives - there was no way back in the forties or fifties that I could get a message anywhere in the world to family and friends in a matter of milliseconds. Despite what the 1940 Hawks' film His Girl Friday might make you believe about its whipper-snapper communication.

But this is exactly my point - phones used to be centrepieces for relevant fun, social or work engagements. His Girl Friday exhibits how well-dressed individuals carefully paired the right candlestick or rotary with their outfits, all while facilitating crazy screwball situations. Where has this functionality of the modern phone gone?

Important artwork from comic artists à la graffiti in toilet stalls are going vastly under appreciated.

Limited access landlines or a payphone would make calls short, snappy, and succinct again. I'm not just referring to my dad's ultra-fast-and-pragmatic 'they haven't got this at the shop, what do you want instead…' type call that last forty-six seconds. (A true story, and average duration.) There used to be socially enforced laws regarding pithiness on shared services, so that people could save money, and lives, if necessary. Yes, there used to be people picking up the phones to surveil gossip about neighbours, colleagues and friends' private lives, but it must've generated a lot of offline discussion within the local community. Your local church minister's salacious acts - discoverable? You would be way more likely to go and confront him in-person. On-phone yapping could be improved with a little urgency. Time is money!!!

While mass communication is great when you need it, nowadays people are more likely to phone you for whatever reason they see fit. In the age of voice notes, there are often soliloquies of Hamlet-ian proportions. Anything greater than 1.5 minutes precisely clocks in as verbose, in my (phone) book. Important side note is that this was my personal Subway Takes take that was stolen from me. A show I definitely never have or never will watch on my smartphone.

Some might text me 'aren't they impractical?' To this I reply: that is entirely the point. We need an impracticality built into at least some phones to still enjoy technological connection. Whole communities used to build up around payphones. According to my friend Bob, pubs used to have them. People would care more about where you were because they needed the specific number. They couldn’t simply fire off a one-way podcast about their day to be ignored. I'm not suggesting adding my address to a Yellow Pages. Those were an interesting enough phenomenon I've always thought deserved their own analysis. But this sense of local community has been transmitted out of existence completely by the readiness of online contact.

The fact is I get enraged when I'm on FaceTime or listening to a voice note catch-up and it cuts, lags or reverts to lower quality, is telling. To someone in the 1940s, this lack of patience would be astounding to even consider. I may be one of those analogue freaks people write about online. The mere fact you will read this on a website shows that I am no stranger to using new tech. I just wish I could look as good as Cary Grant while doing it.