Our post-transistor society has developed a love-hate relationship with communications technology. We love the convenience and gratification of instant communications – voicemail, email, cell phones, pagers, push-to-talk, text messaging, instant messaging, video messaging, chat rooms, forums, podcasts, webinars, blogs, tweets, 520 channels of TV – [BIG INHALE!] – the list goes on and on.
However, we have come to depend on this technology so much that when it doesn’t work perfectly, we get annoyed, frustrated, and upset. Still we keep on using our favorite gadgets, buying more of them, upgrading them to get the latest and greatest new features, and committing more of our time, money, and life to them, believing that they’ll make our life easier, fuller, richer and overall better. But has that really happened?
Party Lines and Listening in on the Neighbors
It seems remarkable to think back to my childhood growing up in Butler County, PA. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when cell phones, satellite dishes, Tivos, iPods, iPhones, and the Internet DID NOT EXIST! (NOTE: Yes, we DID have indoor plumbing, although there were two outhouses back on my grandparents’ farm that were available if we needed to use them in an emergency.)
Our family had ONE telephone in the house – an ugly green (or was it “avocado”?) wall phone with a long cord that was owned by the local telephone company, who had firmly attached it to the kitchen wall …
… and our home phone was on an EIGHT-household party line!
We not only had to share the ONE family telephone with everyone else in our household, we also had to share it with EIGHT – count ‘em, EIGHT - other families in the neighborhood as well. And they could pick up the phone and listen in on your conversations at any time – oh, the horror!
Call long-distance? Only in an emergency or for a special event! I can remember when my uncle, an enterprising young businessman, would arrive back home after a long drive across the state and would then make a person-to-person call to himself at my grandparents house. They’d hear his voice and refuse the call saying that he wasn’t there, knowing that he’d made the trip across the state and arrived back home safely. (A low-tech version of the later “phone phreaking” techniques that people used to steal phone service, I guess …)
Is It My Turn to Talk Yet?
I can remember that using the party-line telephone to make a call was something of an event. Proper party-line phone etiquette dictated that you would pick up the phone, listen to see if anyone else was on the line, then dial the five-digit local number you wanted to call.
If the party line were in use, you’d wait and check back again a few minutes later to see if it was available. If you waited still longer and tried a third time and the neighbors were STILL on the phone, you might interrupt your neighbor and ask them to conclude their conversation so you could make a call.
Usually, this involved some noise-making and throat-clearing and an “Excuse me, but I need to make an IMPORTANT call.” (Of course, it must be important to interrupt the current conversation!)
Since we had to see these folks at church, the store, or on walks around the neighborhood, we considered it more important to maintain good relations with them than to get into a verbal spat over their use of the party line (unless they got obnoxious about it, which few ever did).
But even our patience and willingness to practice proper phone etiquette had its limits: when one neighbor was elected township supervisor and another one became the dog-catcher, my Mom called the phone company to complain about the constantly busy party line. She was rewarded by getting us switched to a FOUR-party line – what a triumph!
By the time I became a teenager in the late ‘60s, we had moved up to a semi-private line – just our family and my uncle and aunt next door sharing the same line – hey, now we’re talking!
(For technical details on how the old party lines actually worked, check out the question and answers here. I understand from talking to a phone technician friend of mine that our local telco handled party line phones by using different ringing voltage frequencies on either the “Tip” or “Ring” wires to make an individual home’s telephone ring when someone called their number. Each phone had a corresponding ringer tuned to that frequency and connected to the correct wire.)
Communications R’ Us
Fast forward forty years or more. Most of us now have multiple wireless phones scattered around our house – and we complain if someone else in our household is hogging the line. Since we hate to wait to talk (or to be overheard by someone – except out in public!), most of us now have our own cell phones, and we can instant message, text message, picture message, page, post, tweet, comment on Facebook, and blog to our hearts content. We are wired – and un-wired – to the max, able to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time.
However, proper communications etiquette seems to have declined a great deal since the old party line days. We have to endure loudmouths yakking on their cell phones in restaurants and on public transportation. We all got so many phone call solicitations from various agencies and telemarketers interrupting our meals that Congress had to pass a law creating a “Do Not Call Registry” to let us get off their auto-dialer lists.
We also have computer viruses, worms, trojans, phishing, pharming, spam, spim (spam via instant messaging), denial of service attacks, security breaches, and wireless network snooping. But still we talk and blog and message on – and on, and on …
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Sometimes you have to wonder – is anybody really listening? Do we really have that much more to say now that’s worth saying compared to the old party-line days? If our self-worth was measured by our call or message or texting volume, then we must be the richest people on earth!
Or do we just like to hear ourselves talk, see our words displayed online for others to read – or “flame” – on a web forum, and enjoy exchanging banter in chat rooms or via instant messaging or Twitter? It seems that the “party line” past has been replaced by the “online” present. Perhaps we really do enjoy the idea of furtively – or blatantly – getting in on someone else’s conversations!
Now if I could just figure out how to use that old long distance calling card that I bought 15 years ago; I’m sure it still has a bunch of minutes left on it!
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