This morning’s New York
Times had two vastly different article about telephones.
The first article was a step back in time, when EVERYONE had a
land line, and NOBODY had a cell phone. Here’s the opening paragraph:
“This is a lament for the
landline, a rhapsody for its dial tone, a hymn to the way it connected people.
It’s the little things we miss. The landline was a focal point of the home, an
antidote to atomization and loneliness, those scourges of our age.”
I’m old enough to remember a time when not only did everyone
had a landline, most people also had a party line, which made it virtually
impossible to have a private conversation with just about anybody.
Although we got our first telephone answering machine in the
early 1980’s, my parents never made that transition. If they weren’t home when
you called, you couldn’t leave a message for them. Not surprisingly, they never
acquired cell phones, even though both of them were still alive when cell
phones first came out in the early 1990’s. They also never owned a personal
computer, even though early versions were available during the same time
period.
Even after we moved to Flagstaff in 2011, I still had a land
line because you needed one in order to have internet service, Eventually, of
course, computer technology had improved to the point that a land line was no
longer necessary to have internet service. Since I was spending roughly $60 a
month for the land line, it was not a hard decision to drop it.
The second article about phones covered not only the present,
but also the future.
A vast majority of the people in our country now own cell
phones. In fact, There are
approximately 330 million cell phones in the United States of America. If you are
keeping track, America has a population of about 311 million people. Not
far behind, unfortunately, is gun ownership. There are nearly three
hundred million privately
owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a
hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns.
By the way, if you think that landlines
are dead, you’d likely be surprised at the fact that 46% of the households in
America still have landlines.
We all love the convenience of
our cell phones. Not only do they allow us to make phone calls virtually everywhere,
they are also a very adequate replacement for our cameras, since picture
quality today is comparable to what the best cameras offered 50 years ago. On
top of that, the apps that we download provide an opportunity for literally
thousands of additional benefits.
Those apps, though, also highlight
the DISADVANTAGE of cell phones. As the second article points out, we can now
be tracked virtually anywhere. To a very large degree, too, even basic computer
knowledge can allow hackers to listen in to our phone conversations.
Ironically, we are back to the time of party lines, where phone conversations were
rarely private.
There is no question that my
parents would have found cell phones and personal computers to be very
confusing. Imagine, then, what would happen if today’s teenagers had to make a
call on a land line. The link below shows what happens when that occurs.
Do you remember the days when you
could go into a phone booth, drop in a dime, and make a call? Believe it or
not, phone booths still exist, although the day of the 10 cent phone call has
now faded into history. Today, there are still 100,000 phone booths that are in
operation in America – and they are still a profitable business. Pay phone providers
reported $286 million in revenue in 2015, according to the most recent FCC
report. They can still be profitable, particularly in places where there isn't
cell phone or landline coverage, said Tom Keane, president of Pacific
Telemanagement Services. Keane's company operates 20,000 pay phones around the
country.
Alexander Graham Bell would be astonished at how popular his
invention is today. By the same token,
most people would be surprised to learn that Mr. Bell would not allow a phone
in his study because he considered it to be an intrusion. His wife and mother
never used the telephone because both of them were deaf,, which later caused him
to work with deaf people. While he was working
as a private tutor, one of his pupils was Helen Keller, who came to him as a young child unable to see, hear, or
speak. She was later to say that Bell dedicated his life to the penetration of
that "inhuman silence which separates and estranges".[n 1893, Keller
performed the sod-breaking ceremony for the construction of Bell's new Volta Bureau, dedicated to "the increase and diffusion of knowledge
relating to the deaf".
Oops, I’ve got to go. I think I have a call coming in.
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